Steemit developer curation experiments, brace yourselfs, major changes are coming
By not playing the praise game or blame game, I assume responsibility for everything.
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I've been on this platform since the end of May, during the truly experimental phase, where all payments were held back till July 4th because they were still tweaking, so we didn't even know if we would get anything for all our efforts.
There were huge discussions at the time about the bots. Everything you have said in your video was raised back then. However, Dan felt that bots were a fact of life, and not only would bots be curating, they'd be writing/spinning material too.
In the end what happened was they changed the curation distribution so the curators got 25% instead of 50% of the pot. And Ned started going through the introducemyself tab and upvoting everyone manually (that's how that tab became a thing!) to distribute some money, and the upset feelings died down for the moment.
My general feeling is that Ned is open to restricting the bots but Dan isn't. And it is because from the beginning the bots always upvoted Dan's stuff, and he made a lot of money from it.
This whole discussion is deja vu for me.
I don't think the developers will change their behaviour - but the community can collectively start upvoting stuff in the "New" tab, to defeat the bots. Bots only make money if lots of people vote after them. The minnows who vote after them add to the pot for that post, but don't really benefit as curators because their weight is too low. If minnows stop playing that game then the bots stop making money - and that is already happening.
BTW you might want to visit the #minnowsunite tab, there is a lot of original content on there.
P.S You might want to look at the Robin Hood Whale project which does a lot of stuff that you recommend in your video:
https://steemit.com/robinhoodwhale/@laonie/robinhoodwhale-27-08-2016
your comment inspired me to create this video :)
I think that on top of the deleterious effect of bot voting, bot-posting is a similar threat from the bottom up towards the ecosystem. I will just leave it at a simple remark, how on earth can a human-created content creator possibly outdo any human, when all the knowledge the bot might use is going to be taken from humans anyway. If people wanted to read AI commentary they would go and find it, if someone ever comes to thinking that it will do anyone any good. I don't see how it possibly can.
The whole AI=god/satan thing is such nonsense. Anyone who has read Accelerando would understand that humans will augment with them, and therefore, how could any pure AI system possibly exceed this capacity of the combination, and I haven't even addressed wetware augmentations that increase organic intelligence? AI's capacity to sacrifice also is non existent. Yes, you could code an AI to have some concept of risk, and moderating it in some way, but in the end, can you separate the human hand from the tools it creates? I don't think so. In the end the decision will be made clear in a court when a run-away AI murders its human servant-master, and the maker of the AI will be liable for murder.
yes, your words resonate, makes perfect sense to me
Delegated voting
It wont work to do your idea. There isn't enough human attention in possession of enough Steem Power for that to work.
What they could do is the plan where they delegate the voting power of a whale to a voting pool of regular bloggers. These bloggers could be randomly selected daily or a whale could simply make a list of people to delegate their voting authority to. These voters would get some portion of the profits in exchange for serving in the voting pool.
So you can do it but I don't think the rewards should be messed with, and I don't think the idea of trying to force behaviors out of curators by limiting who they can vote for is good either. What if the curators genuinely like certain content or like certain bloggers? They should be able to do what they want with their Steem Power.
But there is a problem with discovering new bloggers and the only way to improve that is to acquire more attention by renting human computation from a pool of regular bloggers who serve as delegated voting pools for whales. I think bots are a good thing, but I do recognize there is a need to solve the attention scarcity problem among the whales.
There are less 200 high value curators, allowing them to do whatever they with thousands of users posting thousands of blog post is an irresponsible way to run steemit, this is what happens when people fear money, they give away all their power to those who have all the money. Your idea for delegated voting does sound interesting, that could be another experiment to try.
Debating ideas is a waste if time. The right path is to implement them and see what happens. I suggest that you not reject and debate the ideas I propose as you seem to always do, but focus on your own ideas. Accept all the ideas, be open to try them all, and stick with the ones that work.
The way I see it, on one hand you have the scrapping of curation rewards, and on the other, complicated patches that won't actually reduce this problem. Curators really do nothing for the ecosystem anyway, except draw money out for 'inb4' type behaviour. It's not going to work and eventually everyone will see that I am right about this.
I also think that Dan is wrong about negative voting and flagging as well. Disagreeing should be entirely private, and subjective. It is by its very nature contentious and unnecessary. Rubbish will naturally not accrue as much votes, and this automatically lets it fall down. Even negative votes altogether, will not help, this will become a point of conflict, where it is more productive to, rather than downvote what you don't like, upvote what you do, and may the best votes win.
For the authors only. not for voters.
Curators are critical to determine the value of a post.
Hmm spreading out the voting power to willing participants I like this idea.
Some great points. I think the problem with bots is how do you stop them? I don't think anyone has come up with a good solution yet.
I like the idea of continuing to experiment - Steemit is still a beta and very much in it's infancy so now is the time to test ideas out and fix things.
It will be a lot harder if it gets to the size of Twitter or Facebook.
I've also been actively trying to look at more "NEW" posts too. I think that is a good strategy for finding different types of content.
I've also noticed there seems to have been a drop in the amount of truly new posts compared to a few weeks ago.
Only need to stop the bots of steem power holders with more than 100 MV (less than 200 accounts), they can go thru extra steps to curate, steps that are only humanly possible. Another way to stop bots from curating is to implement penalties for using a bot
You mean like some kind of captcha? I don't know enough about how voting via the CLI wallet works to know if that is viable. It could be done via the GUI/web interface but their is no point if CLI voting will allow it to be bypassed. If it is viable they should do it or at very least test it.
I fear the other issue that may prevent it is do the Steemit team really want to restrict the whales in this way? It is unlikely to be popular with the people that use bots and I am not sure if the will is there to go against their wishes.
I hope they listen to what your are saying but I won't be surprised if the bot situation continues on as before.
It's a shame because we are already seeing a kind of stagnation of content occurring (as you describe in the video).
In this video I said to remove fear from the equation. Steemit progress is hindered by being afraid of how users or investors will react to experimental changes. The money is on the blockchain, nobody can get it out, the developers have all the power, so there is nothing for them to fear. The investors and users will adapt to the changes, and I think they will enjoy the challenges.. makes everything more interesting.
Yes I agree with you I hope they start experimenting in that way because without new user retention this project will not be able to succeed in the long term.
Increasing the cost of curation for big investors runs counter to those amongst the whales who don't bot-vote. You cant have it both ways, unfortunately. I think that ultimately the decision will be made to scrap curation rewards altogether.
End curation rewards. No method to stop bot-voting by robo-whales or diminish its impact will not also mess with the entire human-voting business. Not to mention it is contrary to decentralisation to place such a big and centralised reward on doing something that really adds no value to the ecosystem, in fact, it incentivises the plundering of the market capitalisation, and this leads to investors shying away.
But they WANT bots to curate. Not sure I agree with that, but @dantheman has stated he wants to see advanced ai bots doing the curation so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for him to try and stop bots.
yes, I know what dan has stated, but there are many different paths to success, experimenting with as many of them as possible is best
Dan is going to be proven wrong, because this is the big flaw that is obstructing the flow of investment funds into the Steem Ocean. Or perhaps as yet it is more of a lake, that has got Nestle-flavoured robo-bots sucking it out at everyone else's expense.
one solution is to use one number or letter captcha.
Just that one limit of a whale/bot being able to upvote a specific author every X amount of days would be huge. I follow a couple authors who seem to have wang upvote everyone of their posts. Would love for @wang to jump on my content string. :-)
YES :)
The simplest solution to ending the Bot Wars is to remove curation rewards altogether.
In my opinion, curation rewards are a dumb idea anyway. What exactly is "accurate voting" anyway.
All possible solutions will make bot vote gaming involve onerous limitations, whether it's CAPTCHA, limiting votes on a particular user to some rate per time, or PoW anti-spam measures. Removing curation rewards ends the matter. Besides, isn't there something a little anti-decentralisation about curation anyway? Vote it up to the centralised top list of votes to win moneyz. Top Hitz of Steemz. Enjoy the powah of being a Pop-Star-Maker.
C'mon. This goes against everything else this system tries to achieve.
Without curation rewards, there is no reason to robo-vote.
Finally, this robo-voting business is scaring off investors. You can't buy in a ton of steem for investment purposes, power it up to gain the interest accrual benefit, and not have your SP eaten away by these Robo-Whales who game, gain big fast, then power down, and cash out as fast as they can. It goes directly against the purpose of having vested Steem. It is perhaps the biggest problem with Steem, that will slow adoption and investment.
interesting... I feel like agreeing with you, but I was also looking for what alternative rewards system you would propose to replace curation rewards, or maybe you are saying leave everything as is and do not reward anyone for curating, but still pay bloggers for the value of their posts based on upvotes and comments by reputable users
So that is what is going on. I've been wondering why one person can just post pictures of food and be rewarded handsomely for it, and other writers are completely ignored. Bots need to go out and real flesh and blood human beings need to take control of rewarding content. Lets make this a forum where all can profit according to the value of their work as decided upon by their peers.
very well stated
@craig-grant "HVC" High Value Curator ... much better term!
The static curation value that is bot-ted is surely a problem that many of us would love to see improved upon!
yes.. High Value Curator or "HVC" does have nice corporate sound.
"whale" sounds like ghetto slang
Who exactly is this curating being done for, anyway, by the way? Is it meant as a way to improve the image of the site? People's votes already push posts up and down by differing amounts according to their vesting. Surely the ones who win the most votes should simply represent the ones that the members agree with most?
I don't think that this popularity contest at all helps the system and curators are net takers of value. It nullifies the benefits of having people come in with big money and raising the potential reward height, which keeps the posters competing with each other, and raises the quality benchmark all by itself. Curators cannot possibly substitute for this, and I think the value of non-aggressive shunning upon those who post rubbish has been ignored, and instead we have flamewars here just like reddit, which I believe was something that the creators were trying to eliminate.
Masteryoda is the same person as smooth or a family member. Its all a scam
interesting, I'm not surprised, but I'm confident that with the right kind of changes none of that will matter, in time it could all work itself out in a positive light
i completely agree with u , i brought 17 of my friends on facebook to steemit and now only 5 still active on steemit coz they got tired of posting original contents and not getting rewarded for them .
So they can post for free on Facebook and get rewarded by "psychic credits". There should not be an entitlement mentality. Post because you have something to express and if you get rewards then great.
Especially right now when the market cap is going down and rewards decreasing for all.
at least on Facebook everybody is equal, so you don't feel like a fool