👍🏼 Do You Rate a Book or Movie Based on Its Title? Why the Upvote Option in all Steemit Feeds is Actually Kind of Strange

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I’ve been a part of the awesome Steemit community for almost 8 months now and as long as I can remember we are able to upvote posts directly on the feed pages. This means you can upvote a post from for instance the ‘trending’, ‘new’ or your own feed instantly, without taking a further look at the content of that particular post.

To me, this is a bit strange. It’s like rating a book or movie solely based on its title and cover. Isn’t that weird? What does this mean for the quality of the upvotes given?

Also it is not common practice for content platforms. You cannot ‘like’ a video on Youtube directly from your feed or search results. You cannot clap for an article on Medium directly from the category pages or Homepage.

If upvoting directly from the feeds would not be possible, would that be a good thing? Some things that I see happening if the option is removed from the feeds:

• It would decrease the total number of upvotes given, purely because it takes more effort to upvote.
• The upvotes that are given are more likely to be genuine upvotes given by people that actually read or watched the contents of the post. Of course, everybody can still open a post, scroll down and upvote easily. But even if someone was planning to do that, with the need to open the post he or she is at least able to noticed that the quality sucks (just 1 picture or 3 sentences etc.), and he or she is less likely to upvote if that is the case.
• Due to less ‘dumb/blind’ upvotes, each genuine upvote is worth more since the reward pool remains the same.
• Since you are ‘forced’ before you can upvote to at least take a quick glance at the content, the chance that you will actually read or watch it increases. This might increase engagement on the platform in general and lead to more and better discussions in the comments.
• It would eventually decrease the number of poor quality posts, because the rewards are less and tricking the game becomes less interesting. This incentivises everybody to create better content.

I cannot really think of negative effects for the Steemit ecosystem of removing the upvoting option from the feed. Only the time to upvote takes a few seconds longer. But hey, if you sincerely want to upvote, those few seconds should not matter right?

What do you guys think? Would this be an interesting way to increase real engagement and more genuine upvoting or would this be a bad idea?

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Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor, trader or developer. I am just a blockchain & cryptocurrencies enthusiast. Make sure you do your own research, draw your own conclusions and do not invest any money that you cannot afford to lose.