Trending posts finally made me realize the main problem with SteemIt and how to solve it!
Below you see some problematic statistics of the top 15 posts in trending. The specific statistic i want to make you aware of is the view-voting ratio.
The problem
These 7 out of the top 15 trending posts have the same problem: a view-voting ratio of over 1.0! What this means (if the views are fairly accurate) is that many curators have voted on the post without viewing the actual content. About 50% of the top 15 trending posts have been curated by a majority of curators that didn't view the content. In 2 of the 15 cases over 90% of the curators haven't viewed the content of the post! I don't know about you, but i don't like it all that there is no algorithm in the SteemIt protocol to prevent this, or at least heavily penalize curators that do this.
The cause
In my opinion the main cause of this behavior is "panic voting", because of the way the protocol implementation is right now. Everything in the protocol causes curators to feel rushed and pressured.
Solution
A very simple solution to this problem is not allowing curation right away. To make it even better, the amount of time that curators aren't allowed to curate should be based on the amount of data (text and pictures) in the post. This way it gives curators the opportunity to ACTUALLY curate. This small update to the protocol will improve the fairness of this platform really, really drastically!
Don't forget to follow, resteem and browse my channel for more information!
Good insight calamus, I haven't paid attention to that myself but it totally makes sense. It's pretty astonishing that most of these have 9x the amount of votes than they do views. That just doesn't seem right and I agree that it would better if they handled this in the voting algorithm.
Ok how r u guys getting the instant upvotes I want some lol
Yeah i want to know. I've seen people get exactly 19 votes a few times now. Probably a botnet.
Yup that be my thinkin
Thank you for pointing this out... however, we already do have a helpful solution: downvotes. By spreading this awareness we can downvote articles that are getting bot upvoted etc. A downvote doesn't necessarily mean you don't like the article, it just means you want to affect a redistribution of the rewards. Downvote articles that are botvoted.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@showoff/the-solution-to-steemit-s-curation-problem-us
I definitely like the idea of forcing people to be more careful with their curation, I just wrote about that today, although that post was more for how to do Steemit well, not how to force bad actors to be better. :)
I'd also like to see some kind of system that regulates how long it takes to curate, i.e., you've got to actually read the post before performing an action.
At the end of the day, if we all want Steemit to be rad we're going to have to make every single interaction deliver value. It's on each of us to do that.
Thanks so much for offering a solution, I'll be following this issue!
Nice work I am curios to see how they will handle automation programs cause people online will find ways to exploit the system as this place grows
They already fixed bots a year ago with a concept they called a "reversed-auction", which means you will start at 0% curation rewards at 0 seconds after publication and 100% curation rewards at 30 minutes after publication.
Interesting hope that will work but with technology it always is a race where one technology surpasses another.
I agree with you, this solution is good but not perfect.
because some players will never change their behavior.
I agree with you... Great work
There are going to have to be a lot of tweaks but as the population grows the numbers will change bots and whale share and things like that will become less of an influence as time passes.
They need to make the protocol waterproof, that's the power of decentralization, not having to rely on anything other than the blockchain protocol.
Agreed I hope they do tighten things up I see some things that cause me to cringe ..
Was chatting with a guy the other night and as soon as he posted he had an instant 8 upvotes on each comment he made .. Made a few bucks on short order .
That is a very good point - I guess people are using bots to vote - even if they make a small amount - they don't have to do any 'curation' whatsoever - the bots take care of the whole thing.
I feel that by simpling adding a Captcha like this with an algorithm with number of votes within a span of a specifice time will make the Captcha that much harder to solve.
You can't use a Captcha on blockchain technology.
Interesting. I noticed this shortly after I started but didn't look into it. Good post. Not sure about the solution you propose but I agree we want to make people read the posts and vote on the good ones, not just blindly vote in the hope of payment. The idea of curation is to highlight the great posts and make them easier to find.
I like your post and agree with the first part of it. Actually I don't agree with the second. I think that a system based on the amount of data would not secure quality content. In my opinion it is quite annoying to through thousands of words sometimes if you could state the meaning in just a few sentences.
I think your solution would certainly be helpful. I think people are perhaps upvoting without reading because they want to cash in quickly on posts that are or are likely to become popular/profitable, especially whale posts. This is a major flaw because it motivates people to seek quick profit rather than to diligently search out quality content.