Posting, Curating and Self Voting: How we should adress the flaws.
Over the past few weeks I've heard the same question over and over again. "Why does my payout keep going down?" There are two major reasons for this phenomena. The price of steem/steem dollars and the amount held in the reward pool.
The first has to do with the value of steem and steem dollars. When the prices fluctuate, so does the value of your post. The market has had quite a cooling off over the course of the past couple weeks and seems to just keep going down.
I don't believe this is anything to be concerned about. I am confident that it will pick back up and we will see it reach even greater heights before it's time to correct once again. This is the natural ebb and flow of the great crypto market. Things are volatile, price swings can be wild, but overall the market breaths with almost natural cycles.
Things have already started to improve greatly since the last crash, but I want to encourage everyone to be aware that the price will drop very frequently, whether you want it to or not, as this is the nature of the pool in which we play. Don't panic and most importantly, don't sell yourself short. You can even invest and buy in when the market is low!
The reward pool has dropped considerably since the hard fork. It is finally stabilizing and starting to a balance out once again. It may have been unusually high due to the whale no voting experiment that ended just in time for the hard fork to hit. We all experienced unnaturally high payouts over the past few weeks as a result.
You can expect the payouts you see now to much more accurately reflect what you will experience in the near future. Keep growing your network and improve your quality to pick things up once again!
Another recent trend (since the HF) is that new members especially seem to be having a difficult time attracting votes and followers. It's easy to see that there are less votes being spread around across the board, which is understandable since the max vote was changed to 2% from 0.5%. It's hard to see any benefits from this change, and I'm unsure why it was made in the first place- let alone at the same time as the other major linear rewards adjustment.
Post upvotes should drain 1% max from the voting power pool and comments should drain .5% max. This would allow for 20 full upvotes on posts, 40 full upvotes on comments or some combination of the two. A great improvement from the current 10 max that is especially painful for anyone who doesn't own a slider yet.
Self upvotes should be limited to 3 posts per 24 hours and 2 comments per 24 hours.
This would discourage self voting abuse and hopefully encourage higher quality content.
There may be a drop in the number of posts per day, but there would be no punishment for posting as many as you want.
The limit on self voting would leave more daily power to spread around to everyone else in the community.
When this is coupled with less overall posts, we could expect to see the average payout per post go up across the board.
A person should never be limited on how frequently they are allowed to post, only on how frequently they are allowed to give themselves the valuable upvote. This limitation would even encourage more comment interaction on posts, as a way to fulfill your daily self vote limit, if that is indeed what you choose to do.
Do you think it would be a good idea to earn the ability to upvote yourself by spreading wealth to the community first?
Currently, curation alone isn't enough incentive to convince people that it's better to give than it is to take.
We still see a handful of authors getting all of the high value votes simply because people know it's the most lucrative use of their voting power. Whether this content is truly the best on steemit or not is a debate for a different time. My concern is that it doesn't give the chance for other excellent content to reach the value and visibility that it may truly deserve.
In the end we want a good spread while still allowing us to be mindful of quality and presentation. I think this is the goal of most people, but the curation rewards can sometimes pervert our natural voting patterns. We shouldn't do away with the ability to earn by curating, but we should allow it to more accurately reflect the motivations of our community- which is to provide value for people who create quality content.
It's hard to say what would be a suitable solution to this problem. What do you guys think would be the proper incentive to spread your votes around while keeping curation rewards in mind?
If you don't know what whaleshares are yet, now is an excellent time to find out!
https://discord.gg/NTKXJhK
i m sorry i m totally disagree to you , because writing skills have just few percent peoples , 96% of steemers using just like FB or instagram like comments , likes , dislikes , steem is not made purely for writers or bloggers ,its made for commenters
It's made for everyone. Each and every person should be able to contribute to the community, and get something in return.
If you think I am arguing against commenting, then you're wrong. I am simply pointing out things that can improve the platform for the majority of it's users and allowing the best chance to succeed and grow.
If everyone only knows how to take take take, there will be no hope for the future.
I think everything is fine with the recent HARDFORK. Yes everyone is getting less payouts, but that is only going to be short lived.
Also if we believe this platform will ever grow to compete against facebook/Instagram we have to keep the self voting how it is....Not everyone is going to be a "blogger" on this platform. Some people on facebook just love to comment and like other peoples stuff. If they want to upvote themselves with their 1 Steem power they are given when they sign up, then so what. At least they aren't spending their time facebook.com. This is growing the platform when they are on our site...Plus If they buy steempower then that is even better.
Our goal should be getting people away from facebook and on Steemit....Not worrying about the money so much....The money will come family when Steemit takes more market share from Facebook/Instagram:)
I understand what you're saying. But if people refuse give value to the community, the whole system crashes. And it wouldn't be an environment worth spending time in so we will never reach that level of success to take the market share. A nice balance is what we need :)
The goal is to get this platform ready for 100's of millions of people. It's currently far from ready for that. The algorithms and UI need major improvements first.
Also Facebook is very different from Steemit, so you can't really expect to get most of the people to "switch".
I'm a complete Steemit newbie so I found this super helpful. Also, I just watched this video yesterday that explained how curation rewards work (above) by @craig-grant, also super helpful. I still find this system not totally intuitive but oh well.
Quick question: what is a "slider"? I have no idea lol.
Shared and followed! ;)
There is a slider that you will get around 500 SP. It will allow you to choose how large a vote you want to give.
So at what percentage was your bar at when you gave @jobsande the upvote?
Lol it was %100
My minnow vote isn't worth much xD
Thanks for the info
always
Great question, I was about to ask the same thing!
super helpful, thanks!!
anytime
The slider already exists for everybody at chainBB - https://beta.chainbb.com/
Try it!
You can have slider right now by using this :
https://steemit.com/steemit/@alexpmorris/ultimate-steemit-post-vote-slider-and-past-payout-monetizer-and-next-here-comes-steemtube
thanks to you as well :) ok, I see I don't have access to it since I'm so new I basically have 0 Steem Power lol, oh well hopefully sooner than later! I've been posting like my life depended on it, which isn't too easy with a FT job so I'm sure there will be slow days but doing what I can!
Your correct things have started to recover lately and will continue to do so and yes will go down as well in time that's the game where in . Great article lots of interesting information thank you. Cheers mike
Thanks! I hope we can find a responsible solution to some of these issues.
im sure someone will come up with a suitable idea. Thank you for your reply, cheers mike
I support the fact that the wealth should go round. Thanks for your post. I upvoted and followed. Please follow me back. Thanks
We have same view about the efect of fork 19, hope the things get better :)
They sure will. Slow and steady :)
Thank you for writing this! I learned so much that I didn't know before (what your upvote say are worth for a post vs a comment), etc. I've decided at this point to not self upvote. My voting power isn't super high, but I'd like to reward and encourage others rather than putting it back into my pocket. I know I am always appreciative when others shown me they value my work, so I want to do the same for others. Thanks for the information! I'm always glad when I find posts like this written in a way that I understand!
I'm glad you got value out of it! I can never seem to give as much as I want to people who deserve it. Whaleshares allows me to meet my goal sometimes :-)
I know I posted this in someone else's comments but it's stuck in my head...so small things with great love. Sometimes hats all we can do! Even if you're giving as much as you can that's fantastic, in my very humble opinion!
I agree totally agree the the curation rewards should be modified. Currently curators are not rewarded by upvoting the least popular posts even when these posts are original and good. I think all upvotes should at least earn something and this might result in a fairer distribution of upvotes.
It's possible that this might be a bit more fair, but I'm not sure what the big picture implications are if suddenly every vote earned money. We could get into serious issues if that isn't handled properly.
Thanks for the suggestion!
What if a limit is in placed say 2 votes a day for posts that have lest than 10 votes. I am not sure whether technically this is possible. I have been upvoting some smaller posts previously but not much nowadays as I am not rewarded. Cheers!
I'm not sure if that's possible either.
People with little SP get next to nothing for curation regardless how efficiently we do it. Also, it's always better rewards when you vote on things that are low, but might get large in the future.
I am still new enough to remember the first 2 weeks. I recall that I had higher rewards from my comments than articles - these were upvotes to my comments so it relies on the grace of others. After a while the balance shifted so that I could concentrate more on articles. Remember that you can always repost your best early articles once you have more followers.
Please have a look at my blog, there are a number of articles to both help minnows and about the self-voting issue. Thanks
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i agree votes are scarce and curation goes to the same few trending authors
Can you think of any solutions?
i will give it some thought - i reckon appealing to the community to upvote someone new everyday could help
There are some curation groups that are trying to do things, but it doesn't really address the greater issue. It certainly helps and is commendable.
One new solution has already started = Minnows Accelerator Project
The voting issue is a different problem = solved here
Also, the perception of having fewer votes is a psychological condition that we like to see ourselves at 100%. @timcliff wrote a long article showing that we have as many votes as we want - or need - we just end up operating at a lower voting power, but as that is now worth 4x what it was we can go back to 40 votes at 25%x4 and pretend we were back at pre-HF19.
I did stress that the psychological problem of this issue is a real problem and that the UI could change that perception by changing the visible power % without changing the underlying algorithm.
Yes, people with hundreds of followers frequently receive less than 10 votes on any given post. While quality and audience have some to do with this, I think it would be beneficial for it to be easier to spread the votes around, especially when the majority of users don't even have a slider.
Thanks for this post. I'm a mini-minnow trying to understand. I love the platform, the community and the interaction. I'm confused about how a mini-minnow can get a fish-food-flake. This helps but it's an uphill climb with very little reward on the horizon.
Haha yea, it is a tough climb. The best thing I can recommend is that you join a community. There are some great ones on discord like whaleshares and P.A.L
I have a discord link near the end of my post if you want to come say hi. We do a lot of giveaways and have a lot of fun.
I have recently started a project to help minnows further: Minnows Accelerator Project [Reward Share and 200 SP Delegated][July 2017 Signups].