Are you Tired of Bots setting their votes to occur 29 or 30 minutes after a post is created?

Fix the problem!

If the curation reward period of every post was a random time, and based on an algorithm that couldn't be automatically calculated by a voting bot without costing additional computing power (and time), curation would occur naturally as-intended since the inception of Steemit.

How could you do this?

Well, I'm not a Steemit expert, but I know enough to make dangerously-close-to-possible suggestions so here goes some possibilities:

1. Use a Random Number Generator with a Seed that constantly changes based on something like: Time of Day of Post, length of an account's user name, number of characters in the post, file size of images in the post, the number of non-space characters in a post, or a combination of any of these easily identifiable attributes.
2. If the random number generator with a changing seed wouldn't be enough, add in the numeric-only values from an MD5 hash of a combination of any data already on the blockchain.
3. Not enough? How about adding in something like the count of posts (and/or comments) occurring over the last 15 minutes to provide another level of computational difficulty?

But WHY would you do this?

• Curation was not meant to have people sitting around waiting for a post to reach 15 minutes (proposed in #hf20), or 30 minutes in the current environment so a curator can maximize their return on their up-vote.
• Curation was meant to reward those who promoted the most interesting and COMMUNITY-VOTED valuable content.
• Curation should not be treated a way to strategically augment income, but instead passively provide a nominal benefit to the promoters of interesting content!

More Details

• Once the random number is generated (for each post), add that random number of milliseconds/seconds/minutes/hours (depending on the size of the random number that is generated) to the posting time, or the 15/30-minute starting point, and set a 5 or 10 minute window from that point where curation rewards are the most valuable as compared to other points.
• This could still result in curation rewards being augmented during the first 6 / 8 / 10 / 12 / 24 hours of a post's creation in order to encourage "early" voting on the most valuable content.

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Alternatively, provide a linear (or square root, or n^2, or whatever makes the most sense) curation reward amount for a longer period of time. The current system benefits automated curation during a small window of time that can easily be automated as part of a curation trail.

I forget if this was in the Steem WhitePaper, but why would we not provide a wider curation reward benefit window? Naturally, this will decrease the individual curation reward shares of curators and therefore encourage more HUMAN reviewing of content for QUALITY. Then, the "high-quality" content, which is voted on by the largest portion of the community, will actually have an advantage over the "lower-quality" content. Curation rewards will be diluted from accounts who pick lower-quality content to support (yes, I'm talking about the voting bots) and the higher curation rewards will be collected by accounts supporting the higher-quality content.

This method should also encourage higher quality content to finally make the Trending and Hot Pages; as opposed to the self-promoted posts via bot or large-stake upvotes.

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These are just some of my thoughts.. and I'm honestly shocked (but not really).. that these suggestions haven't popped up before.

I can't speak to every witness, as I'd be lying if I said I read all of their proposals for action on the platform, but I know that I haven't seen any of the top 20 witnesses discuss an alternative to the overwhelmingly obvious fact that changing the minute when curation rewards are weighted highest isn't going to change a single thing for manual curators on Steemit.

If the reason for changing this timing is to allow manual curators more of a chance to collect curation rewards without having to wait until minute 30 after a post... this isn't going to change a damn thing! You're still going to have to wait until minute 15 to upvote the post.. and that's just as bad as having to wait until minute 30. On the other hand, if a bot is voting at minute 29/30, they can just as easily vote at minute 14/15...

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Circling Back...

Please do something new and stop trying to do the same thing over and over again when it didn't work the first time

Curation Rewards should NOT be augmented at a known, calculate-able, time. Since the community agrees that the value of the community will increase when we have more quality content being supported by the community, we should continue to provide curation rewards, but assign the rewards in such a way that there TRULY is a Level Playing Field between bots and humans -- when neither of them know when the curation rewards are granted and support is focused on quality content instead of rewards!

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