Curation Rewards - Is CAPTCHA The Answer?
A New Way Of Thinking
The debate surrounding the rewards for curation of Steemit posts rages on, I hadn't planned to make another post on the matter, however earlier today I was speaking to my good friend Bleepcoin and he came up with an idea that I thought worth mentioning.
The idea of using CAPTCHA has probably been discussed before, but I feel coming at the problem from the angle Bleepcoin suggests, could be the answer.
CAPTCHA
C ompletely A utomated P ublic T uring test to tell C omputers and H umans A part
For the few of you that don't know, or didn't realise; A CAPTCHA is a program that is used by some websites to protect against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass and computers cannot.
So a CAPTCHA might ask you to type in two distorted words you see, like below, or identify a particular type of animal or fruit in a series of pictures. There are dozens and dozens of different types of CAPTCHA, and they all aim to do the same thing, ensure that real human beings are using the site they're placed on.
The Dilemma
The problem with assigning a CAPTCHA to a vote or share, or even comment, is that you may well put off certain human participants, simply because they can't be bothered to go through the process. Aside from the fact that it can make the whole process cumbersome.
The Solution
Bleepcoin's excellent solution to this; is that a CAPTCHA is made optional after the vote, comment or share has been made. In practice, this would look something along the lines of a tiny pop-up CAPTCHA with a note along the lines of;
Do you wish to validate your action by completing a CAPTCHA?
If not you can still vote but you will not be personally rewarded.
Conclusion
The message probably needs a bit of work, but at least this way, the auto-vote bots can still vote and mine for the community, but they get zero rewards. In other words, they're working for US!
What do you think Steemers?
Cryptogee
Only If bots cannot get around it by avoiding steemit and going directly to the blockchain.
Captcha should only be used for login or after a trigger # of votes\comments in a short time. It gets old really quick.
Surely a CAPTCHA is the same whether accessed from Steemit or the blockchain? I don't know, I'm not a blockchain expert. High value posters would never have to complete, it would be for new accounts, or ones that had never completed one and their only activity on Steemit is voting.
The whole getting old thing can be bypassed, because the CAPTCHA is after the action, not before; is that even possible?
Like I said, I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there.
That sounds like superb idea but I would still be concerned that the voting process would take too long. Yes you would be incentivised to claim your reward but really active people, who we really want contributing would be filling in captcha's constantly. It would create quite an overhead in time over a long period of time.
That problem could be solved by allowing confirmed people who complete a random number of CAPTCHAS to be able to bypass. You could even link it to if the person had commented and posted. Particularly posting, somebody that had many high value posts would never have to complete a CAPTCHA.
Do not ever put that crap captcha anywhere on this site please. I'd rather deal with bots than captchas.
You could ignore them, that's the point.
Thanks for your thoughts. I said this in another post recently. If bots are as smart as humans --social media wise, what are we missing here? Why even vote if they (bots) know whats best? Can the system slowly but surely evolve to rewarding the human element? Maybe if every block, we go back 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 ... blocks and say who was right in early voting about what would touch other humans. Lets trust them in the future. Are they a transition point voter? Sure, a bot or human voted before them, but if they have a higher weight of credibility they are like a first voter, having no reason to copy someone else. Slowly humans, having greater wisdom, will rise, and dumb choices of others including bots ... well you get the point. The only weakness is that two parties may arise, one of which is false. Its the responsibility of current early contributors to vote up the human side, otherwise Steem will fail.