What Should Be Trending At Steemit? + Jerry Controversy Of The Day (Bonus)
Is it a good thing that the top 3 articles in Trending are all Steem(it)-focused (and arrived at the top from large, paid upvotes?) I'm kind of thinking...it's not.
While constructing an image for an unrelated article last night (and, as it turns out, stumbling into a controversy-to-be my autovoter had already provided token approval to - more info/TLDR at the end), I noticed that the top 3 articles in trending were all specifically Steem/Steemit related.
I have to agree with @Transisto that this is a problem. In the past, he has run a bounty campaign for getting any Steemit post to the top of Reddit. I don't recall the exact terms, but I think it was r/all, maybe only the front page top (which would be about top 8-10), and I also forget the bounty but it was substantial. I'm not sure if it is still running, but I do agree with the spirit of the idea.
Incidentally, I was actually excited to find my own post on Segwit2x reposted on a Bitcoin subreddit a month or two after I joined Steemit, but it did not rise enough to make it to r/all.
Profit motive is much-maligned around here. It really shouldn't be - the pursuit of profit is generally the pursuit of freedom, as you are only as free as your control over your own time. Selling your labor and time for money is a trade of freedom, that simply can't be denied.
Yet, many posts have a self-righteous commenter noting how they post "for the art" or "for the anti-censorship", but much as an exchange is only as useful as the depth of its order book, a "social media/blogging" site is only as useful as its audience, regardless of the "pure" motivations for one's posting (as if feeding a family was somehow impure?)
Well, if we want to attract new users for any reason other than the obvious killer feature plastered on the front of every post (the pending payout), then don't we need a reason for them to come here? There's certainly not a parade of posts that a non-Steemit user would find interesting on the Trending page. It looked pretty similar last night, although you'll notice that "one of these things is not like the other":
I try to write posts that will appeal to the most likely users to find Steemit - crypto, but not necessarily Steem(it), enthusiasts. Truth is, my posts would make more if I wrote more about Steem(it), because that really does seem to be the most paying topic around here. To be fair, I do post on Steem related issues but I actively avoid posting on them nearly as much as I otherwise would. I try to cover general finance and cryptocurrency that would bring value to some users in the future, and particularly evergreen content (well, at least longergreen[tm]). My Steem posts are confined to rants like this and price warnings about buy/sell timing for Steem/SBD.
I'd certainly like to see more Steem content that makes me want to link Steemit to people that aren't already on Steemit.
In other news...
The TLDR on the controversy from last night is it appears Jerry Banfield organized a Steemit meetup that he initially titled "Steemfest 2.5", apparently without permission from Steemfest's creator, RoelandP. Not much else to add here; definitely was a bad idea on Jerry's part.
If you want the juicy stuff, you should just hit the post directly:
https://steemit.com/dlive/@jerrybanfield/3a2b4d4c-1bd0-11e8-8e74-0242ac110002
We also have a Radio Station! (click me)
...and a 10,000+ active user Discord Chat Server! (click me)
Sources: Steemit, Google
Copyright: Steemit, The Simpsons
To answer the question posed in your title, at the risk of stating the obvious, what should be trending is whatever those who are curating find to be the best of what's available on Steemit.
As noted, that's not what's happening, because instead of the curators having a say in what's the best content, the creators are the ones saying it, with their self-upvotes, paid votes or delegation.
So, those among us who aren't regularly getting what they feel is fair for their subjective quality content who regularly use bid bots are definitely taking away from the curators who might otherwise help them, and (this is gut only), are probably taking away from themselves or other creators because of the bid bots, since there's only so much reward money to go around each time.
Thus, the same circumstance that drives people to the bid bots becomes an endless loop of self-perpetuation. Post isn't being seen without the bots, but then getting upvoted by the bots takes visibility away from other bidders and those who don't bid at all. You can't always win the bidding, or the bots are too crowded or not fully charged, so your post doesn't get seen, anyway.
Round and round we go.
Other than everyone needs to stop thinking their content is awesome, let others decide that, and everyone do their best to create value and curate it, I don't know if there truly is a fix through code. At least not incremental tweaking or refining. Every change has its unintended consequences followed by some kind of user workaround.
So, the whole system might need to be scrapped.
Which isn't going to happen, so, most likely we will spin ever farther out of alignment.
Until SMTs, of course. Then everything just magically falls into place. :)
I agree and I think a big part of the problem is the Trending page itself. If you use revenue generated as the metric for what's trending, or at least for what is highlighted by whatever label, then that incentivizes looking at the platform as an earning competition to be seen.
So if you've been on here long enough to have a lot of followers, or had a large community elsewhere you could bring here with you, you can get your content seen without bots. But if you're new and starting not knowing anyone here, it is very hard to get your content seen without bots. The way posts are selected to be shown to people who aren't already followers is the issue that I think most needs addressing. Do that and the bots will naturally lose their influence.
Totally agree. I think there's way too much reliance on the upvote button. Anywhere outside of Steemit curation is handled through a sharing mechanism, which in our case is the resteem. So, I don't know how that might work, or if it even could. When/if Communities shows up, I wonder how that will affect the trending/hot pages simply from the standpoint that the existing tag system will be modified in someway.
It's amazing how, even with recent updates and more communication over the last two weeks, we still don't know a whole lot of how things will ultimately be.
I have question. Why would anyone use SMTs over EOS? The creator of the Steem token, Dan the Man, left to create a better token. Assuming someone discovers this during their research, what is the incentive to use SMTs to launch your ICO over EOS?
I know I'm not qualified to answer your question, so if someone else with more working knowledge comments, too, go with their answer. In the meantime, I'll take a stab.
What I've read from others, and agree with, is the STEEM ecosystem is already created, up and running, with social media apps and users. Depending on when EOS finally arrives, STEEM will be a year and a half, two years, or more down the road. So, until there's somewhere to go with EOS other than the promise of a great blockchain with Dan behind it, STEEM is still the only real player up and running.
So, some of this might come down to when SMTs drop vs. EOS, but barring some massive shift to EOS without any major glitches, STEEM wins out because it's already in the space.
In concert with Velocity, I believe the STEEM ecosystem becomes that much more attractive.
I'm not sure how this is all supposed to work, but I also understand that SMTs will allow entrepreneurs to use their own site (existing, modified or new) that can sit independent of the blockchain, and yet still access it with their own token. They won't have to build an app or site from scratch (I believe), or necessarily conform to every protocol or line up with code other than what's necessary to use the SMT.
Those are my guesses. I'm sure there's more, but I hope that gives you something to go on.
Thanks Glen. Whenever EOS comes out with a social network (that attempts to improve Steemit), I'll certainly use it in addition to Steemit. My hope is that we have 2 great platforms and that competition makes both of them better. It is starting to get a little nasty. I don't know if you heard, but Ned downvoted a Dan post that was about EOS (effectively censoring it). So there is no love lost between these two right now. There's no reason for any of us to take a side. We'll see how it all plays out. I'm pro-competition!
Oh, I saw it all right! It's hard to choose which one of those is actually the one you want leading out. I guess we'll see what EOS does. I agree. Competition is sorely needed and will make things better.
I'm totally surprised there's no kind of non-compete agreement for at least three years after EOS gets up and running. It seems like plenty of entities do that, especially where a founder or principal employee strikes out on their own. I've been a part of them.
Maybe the tech business is different. It's sour grapes, though, if you don't have a non-compete in place and then the ex-partner goes and competes.
And I'll probably be over there on the other social media platform, too. :) Why confine yourself to just one, unless one proves so obviously better.
Steemit is far from perfect, but it is very good and one of the most innovative ideas I've seen in the last decade. I know how Steemit can easily be fixed. Currently there is no moderation for the tags. I would allow for moderated tags to compete with non-moderated tags. You need both moderated tags, and absolute freedom tags. A moderator, for example, could make a rule that any posts that uses a bot for an upvote is banned (banned from being seen on that tag only). I also want tags to remain that have absolutely no moderation (other than flagging). I want to see moderated tags compete against un-moderated tags so we have the best of both worlds and people can decide which tags they will use. If this feature is implemented on Steemit, I think most of the the problems will go away.
So, I think Communities is supposed to be something like what you say, because they are definitely supposed to play off of the current tag structure. There will be moderators and administrators which can make up their own rules. What I don't know is if the current tag system will be separate, or if it will be up to each Community to keep things free or not.
I don't know when it's supposed to happen, and I don't know if it will be exactly what you're talking about, but it's been in the works for a while and it's supposed to be "around the corner." :)
The bandwidth fix is said to have been right around the corner for the last several months.....
So don't hold your breath. If I remember right, that's supposed to be resolved with HF 20, so hey, different dev team, but still more waiting.
Excellent. I hope the Communities feature works out.
I have to agree with this, i really do think that this provides a layer of sanity in this open system. By having both, its an option for the end user. There are some issues with this that would need ironed out, in terms of how moderation could work on the steem blockchain. I mean we are simply just tagging but conceptually I think this could actually improve things.
Curated tags are a great idea. I told my sister that long term, decentralized systems won't last because cheaters will always cheat, scammers will always scam and people will look for the easiest way to game a system for personal gain. I also said there will need to be some small centralized layer. This could actually be the curation of tags with some rules set to ensure quality content is trending that people want rather than content that authors are forcing...
I don't find them interesting as a Steemit user either. The trending page is the absolute worst place to find good content that's worth sharing anywhere. And the use of vote-selling bots has only made this worse.
It has been said many times before that the trending page should probably highlight a different collection of posts from a variety of categories and not just the highest payouts. It should also probably not be THE page to highlight on the Steemit.com landing page. It's an absolutely terrible first impression and representation of the community.
Actually...it currently represents the community rather well, which is unfortunate. Still, it needs a lot of reworking to make it relevant or to actually improve the quality of what ought to be "showcased" from the community as a whole. As it stands right now - and has stood for a long time - it's just downright embarrassing. But I'm just going to assume that nothing will change, as usual. So what can we do about it?
I agree with your somewhat nihilistic viewpoint. I guess all we can do is ironically post about it on the very platform we are complaining about, since as previously covered, Stinc's focus is not on Steemit.
I hope they are right about SMTs.
I wouldn't say it's nihilistic. It's just reality. The trending page has been the target of much criticism (and mostly valid) since the summer of 2016. Many ideas have been suggested on how it can be improved. The only change that we've seen has been the consequence of content being opened to a 7-day voting period. That's it. STINC is obviously not interested in addressing the concerns or improving it in any way...kind of like the rest of the site.
As far as SMTs go - I don't care much for the idea. I don't think it'll add much value and will in fact add a lot of bloat to a blockchain that is already struggling with memory/storage requirements from those trying to keep it online/functional. Steem has a lot of room to scale and we're operating at a rather low capacity right now, but I'm not seeing many proposals for how scaling will actually occur once the user base exponentially expands and/or an exchange is brought online with potentially millions of daily transactions in addition to the regular social media use.
Unless the scaling and node issues can be addressed first, there's really no point in pushing through the SMT project. RPC nodes are already near or exceeding the 256GB capacity and witness nodes are moving to 32GB+ with less than 100K active users and ~1 million daily transactions. The rate at which upgrades will be necessary will continue to increase.
And with ICOs still under scrutiny and undecided by federal agencies like the SEC, I'm not sure that SMTs are the right kind of attention that we need around here. Why SMTs and ICOs is something that has taken precedence is beyond me. Basic infrastructure and functionality/features for the flagship site is needed more than anything else. That should be STINC's main concern, in my opinion.
But as usual, nobody wants to consider what little ol' me has to say...until 6-12 months later when my critiques finally become the trend du jour and what I've said happens to be pretty much spot-on. What else is new though, amirite?
"But as usual, nobody wants to consider what little ol' me has to say...until 6-12 months later when my critiques finally become the trend du jour and what I've said happens to be pretty much spot-on. What else is new though, amirite?"
Boy, do I know how this goes.
I don't think Stinc considers Steemit the "flagship" around here, anymore.
This is an incredible conversation. I haven't been here for all the convo on this from back then that you reference, but it has been my recent thought too. The problem is the metric that makes something worth promoting by the platform. It reflects the community, but chicken or egg?
Is not the community shaping itself around the values the platform promotes for what deserves prominent display? If that metric is how much a post is earning, well then you have everyone focused on getting their posts to earn more than others and quickly. That's the value system of the platform in terms of what it does, not what it says its values are. There are other wonderful values on here, like an economy of kindness and generosity. But we can know the dominant values by what is being highlighted.
As for SMTs, in my limited understanding of them I have mixed feelings. I'm excited about their potential to create mini-steemits that give people interested in a certain topic (or organization/business) a way of doing what we do here on steemit without these issues around having quality content be seen. It won't be decentralized, so probably they will boot any spammers. Or they'll use an algorithm for promoting posts that is something other than trending.
But the technological issues you list make it sound unworkable, at least without jeopardizing what's already going on here. Which points me back to the idea that they are prioritizing what they value. So maybe the values running things around here are more about some objective that has nothing to do with the strength of Steemit in the long run.
Nah, it's really not. Upvoting by bots seems like the only way things move forward around here. As it stands, too much SP is required for accounts to have a meaningful vote. Not everyone has the capital to achieve high SP. The problem is that whales don't manually curate since its easier to sell votes to bots.
Having 1000SP earned barely gives a $0.20 vote. That's the issue. We have too many new users with sub 500 SP so there's not much to go around. What does go around only goes to vote bots. 1000SP should give at least a $1 upvote at full power. This way minnows can upvote meaningful content. All I see are the same individuals in the hot and trending tabs that self vote since they dropped $5000 back when Steem was under a penny and have ridiculous amounts of SP.
This has to change or Steemit will be ruined.
"The problem is that whales don't manually curate since its easier to sell votes to bots."
I agree with the first half, but don't have data to corroborate the second. There's so much crap on here that curating is a terrible chore and pays very poorly. Whales are just doing what we would all do - the action most economically incentivized by the system.
Why is this something that is a concern or ought to be addressed? This is a DPoS blockchain and a social media platform. Neither of those have anything to do with ensuring that everyone has an equal say or an equal amount of visibility/popularity.
Right, that's easy to say when users were in at the early stages. Think of the blogging aspect of Steemit. When you write daily and write excellent content that only gains $0.10 while someone who got in and dropped $5K in early 2016 can self vote themselves for $50, you start to see the difference on why it should be addressed. We complain when a few select users take unfair advantage of the system, but in your viewpoint this is ideal. In that case, the highest SP users that have over a million SP should constantly self vote themselves to oblivion since they don't care that your rewards are now basically gone. The whole point of Steemit is that you get paid for your time. That's what makes it so lucrative and why its grown so fast. If we take that away and have such a large discrepancy in inequality, people will be tired of the bs and leave.
For Steemit to grow we need to not only gain new users, but to retain those users and keep them engaged. Nobody wants to be on a platform where they're not appreciated and their work basically gets binned. Meanwhile, I see accounts that post the dumbest Memes and constantly get paid hundreds. It's easy to say that when you have 40k SP, but you wouldn't be so quick to do so if you had 500. We're in the early stages, but if Steem goes to $25 or even $250 then what happens? The rate of SP that new accounts gain will be so small that nobody will spend their time on here.
Nobody wants to be on a platform where the inequality is so great. That's how Steemit loses its user base and the price plummets.
Of course, this is my opinion and I'm sure that everyone will have their own say on the matter. Unfortunately though, it doesn't matter since neither you or I have the ultimate say on how this site is run.
I so, so, so agree with you! How about having only the 14 SP delegated when you start! Thankfully I was able to buy $100 of STEEM to power up, and won a contest that allowed me to power up a little more, but I'm still sub 100SP. My upvote doesn't give someone even 2 cents yet. (Though in a week I think I achieve a .02 upvote!)
Meanwhile, I put in the time not just writing quality content, but curating it. I'm willing to do that with meager compensation on the curation end for sure, but I have so little power to help those I'm trying to promote simply because I'm too new and not independently wealthy.
I use myself as an example, but this is not me complaining for my own sake. I'm concerned about the future of the platform for these reasons. I invited a bunch of new people to join me here on Steemit last night and I see a few have today. But I don't know how to guide them through this issue other than telling them to use bots to advertise their posts. Some can, some can't. Those who can't, will they stay? I can't exactly help them with my .02 upvote.
Sadly it seems like this place turned out just like the real world. The rich get richer and the poor always dream of moving upwards but the system strongly favors those who already have wealth. Voting value needs to be more evenly distributed. New accounts shouldn’t be voting only $0.01
Yes, it is unfortunately repeating that dynamic. Old money wins. And I only have a .01 vote because I could spend $100. Those who can't do that don't even have a .01 upvote. You have to have 23SP to give a penny at full power, and the initial delegation is currently 14SP.
If I understand correctly, that 14SP used to be 28SP. So is this continuing to decrease? Is there some reason the platform's growth can't sustain giving new users enough SP to be fully active on the platform? Value of upvote is one thing, but I hear of people at 14SP also having terrible bandwidth problems. Is this meant to be a "pay to play" platform? I thought it was supposed to be about "proof of brain."
agreed. steemit related content isnt whats going to pull in outsiders, and crypto is so overblown everywhere. we need content that has mass appeal to a wider audience and that doesnt rely on the highest trending tag or a promo bot. there is some excellent stuff thats for the most part overlooked except thru the wonders of curation peeps like curie and ocd.
I've seen some amazing artists like @gric, and I met an awesome rapper @geechidan
There's a lot of cool stuff on here but it sure isn't anywhere near trending.
agree
I remember you telling me that for the most part, trending is BS... you told me this a while ago... I think i've come to the conclusion you were dead on accurate on your negative outlook.
I didn't realize there was any debate left on this topic!
hahahahha yes!!! some of us just learn a little slower
I would like more steemit posts from you. The main reason is that I want to learn everything I can about the platform and get opinions from those who know more. I've given up on other cryptos and converted my small holdings to steem.
You may enjoy filtering through my post history then. Check out my series on jump-starting your blog.
I definitely will!
Indeed sir, maybe time to give trending a make over 😁 thanks for bringing much needed attention to this!
I wish they would, but I fear the focus is elsewhere!
It's odd. I get the most engagement when I write about Steemit. But I don't want every post to be about that, so I try to add-in other content. I want to help current users and bring in new people through my social media accounts and Google searches.
Yes, I've bought some STEEM and powered up, but remain just under 500SP. I enjoy this platform and believe the best is yet to come.
You hit the nail on the head here, i for one do not visit the trending page anymore as i see the regular names gracing the page everytime. I was bothered to conclude that perhaps no other person is writing or doing things worthy of huge visibility. Then i realized it's all about how deep one's pocket is, not necessarily about the interesting or catchy nature of the content
With the current nature of Trending and vote buying bots, this is an accurate assessment.