Fixing Steemit's Post Promotion. Out Competing the voting bots!
I think one of the most promising features of steemit is the promoted section. It is a built in feature that allows people to get attention to their posts while also benefiting the entire steem ecosystem. Unfortunately, in it's current set up, it seems that it is only worth it if you want to spend $15 or more. I'm going to talk about how it currently works, the problems I see with it, and some potential solutions. Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments so that we can make this feature more powerful for everyone.
Overview: How Post Promotion works Currently
To promote a post you send at least 1 SBD to the @null account. This account is not owned by anyone and automatically removes the SBD you sent from circulation. This is known as "burning" the SBD. This lowers the amount of SBD in circulation which puts upward pressure on the value of steem. In other words, when a post in promoted, it is "payed" to everyone who owns steem because it increases the value. The more people are promoting content, the more valuable steem will get. It is in all of our best interest to make the promotion feature succeed.
In return, your post is added to the promoted section of steemit, which you can see next to the trending, new, and hot sections. The order that the posts are in is based on who burned the most SBD. So if you want to be at the top, you can go to the @null account's wallet and see how much was sent there for the top post, then simply pay more than that. Your post will remain there until you receive the payout from that post.
Vision for the Promoted Section
I see the promoted section as a way for people to get exposure to a greater range of users. This is especially useful for new posters who don't have many followers and don't have any chance of getting to the trending or hot sections.
I see it as a replacement for the voting bots that I think take value from steem. The only purpose voting bots have is to help users boost their payout amounts in hopes that they can make it to the trending and hot pages. Right now, it is almost a necessity to get exposure, but I think it has a net negative effect on the platform. Every time someone promotes a post, it adds value to steem, when someone pays a voting bot, it removes value from steem (I don't want to go into how it removes value in this post, maybe in the future)
I see it as a way for everyone to find new and interesting content that people believe in enough that they are willing to promote it.
I see it getting to the point where it is more valuable for you to promote someone else's post than to send them a direct tip.
Current Drawbacks
The biggest issue I see with the current set up is the ROI (return on investment) is too low in most cases. There seems to be a threshold where if you pay less, you won't really have any effect. Currently, that threshold is around 15 SBD. That is about what it costs you right now to get in the top 20 posts on the promoted section. Any lower and you start dropping in line fast. This means that it makes more sense to pay a voting bot to upvote your post than to use the built in promote feature which is a shame.
Another issue is that, even though I like to go to the promoted section to find posts, it is hard for me to get in the habit of going there. This is because, if you go there more than once every 2 or 3 days, you are likely to just see the same posts because they stay in the same order until they are paid out or until someone pays more than them. (There is a somewhat similar problem with the trending page, but it's not as bad and we'll save that for a future day) This is a big problem because if no one goes to the promoted section, what is the point of promoting your post?
Solutions?
I have a few potential ideas that I think could increase the value of the promoted section and thereby, increase the value of the entire platform.
Dynamic order to the promotion tab
If the promotion tab would rotate content a little more, I think that would attract more views. Instead of just putting them in the order of most paid, it could randomize it, weighting the posts by high much they were promoted for. For example, if a post was promoted with 50 SBD and another with 1 SBD, the first would be 50x more likely to show up at the top. We could possibly even use an accumulating probability algorithm. I have built a pretty good one but I won't bore you with the details in this post.
Pay per click/impression
I don't know how possible this idea is, but what if you only paid for upvotes/views/impressions. Let's say you send 10 SBD for promotion. We could somehow track when someone sees/upvotes/opens your post from the promoted section and deduct that from the SBDs you sent. When the post pays out, the @null account would see how many impressions/upvotes/views the post had, and based on how much they all cost, refund any leftover SBD. This is basically the model that online advertising uses so I figure it must work to some extent.
Promoted posts in trending/hot
This is a bit of a no brainer idea. We should mix promoted posts into the trending/hot lists. This would give more exposure to the promoted posts as well as give variety to those sections.
Promoted posts on the sides of the page
Similar to the last suggestion, we could put promoted posts on the sides of the website. This would, again, give more exposure to the promoted posts. We could probably even have an option for people to pay a small amount of SBD to remove the promoted posts.
For a great explanation and visual of these last two ideas, check out this post.
Well, that's all I've got so far. I hope it can at least get some more ideas flowing. I think this could be one of the most useful features on steemit and I would love to see it replace those annoying voting bots.
If you liked this post, be sure to upvote/resteem, I don't have many followers yet, so if you think this could be useful, please resteem so that more people can see it. Also, you can follow me for more posts on solving the problems in the world. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Thanks for reading!
how do they keep the price of steem dollars roughly $1 US dollar
The amount available is inflated or deflated to control the price.
The goal for steem dollars is to keep it close to the USD so that you don't have to use actual USD. At least that's what I figure. You can see another cryptocurrency example of this with Tether. It's a crypto, but it tracks the price of multiple different currencies.
Here is a post that goes into great detail about how it works. https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/introduction-to-steem-dollars-sbd
Basically what @randystiefer said.
the invisible hand ;)
Interesting post. Important discussion for the community to have. I think what really subtracts from Steem is upvoting posts that no one cares about and only exist to create currency. Don't you think promoted posts that lead to upvotes for content that no one ever reads or really cares about other than to earn SP/SBD subtracts from steem?
Would be interested to see your "accumulating probability algorithm" if you ever release it Zlib/BSD/MIT license.
I agree. I think all posts should bring some value. I think that it is up to us as voters to only vote on good posts whether they are promoted or not. If it isn't profitable to post crap posts, they will stop being posted. I think it's mostly unrelated to whether it's promoted or not. Thanks for reading and the great comment. I'll be sure to most about the accumulating probability algorithm in the future. It's simple but it works for what I need it for.
Sound good. Thanks again for your ideas. Look forward to reading more
Hey there @littlejoeward! Great post! It is uncanny how much of your post I agree with actually!
Almost all of your points I am in agreeance with, but have outlined myself in 2 in-depth posts I posted on this issue of Upvote Services. 1 as a diagnosis of the problem, and how it negatively impacting Steemit, and the other as a proposal on utopian.io as a proposed solution. You can find them here :
Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function
I do believe we are on the same page on the matter and my main effort right now is actually getting enough awareness about what can be done in hopes of having something implemented.
If you do have a look at the posts, and am of agreeance to what I wrote, it would really help if you could resteem it such that it may actually get out there. I am putting in a lot effort to push this proposal through and get enough support to have it implemented!
Thank you!
I wouldnt even mind a promoted ad on the side of the page. Reddit does this and its barely annoying at all.
Another possibility is for people to promote a post on their own! (I just promoted this post)
If the 37 people who voted for this post each kicked in a dime, that would give it a little more bump in the ratings.
Just a thought.
Thanks! Yeah, I promoted this post for $15 just to test it out. I would love it if promoting people's posts was a better thing than tipping them. Though right now, tipping is better
@littlejoeward - I wish that I had read this post before promoting my post :p Some really good ideas here and I think you should write a contribution post to utopian.io and see if they will implement it on busy.org!
Thanks for the post. I am really excited about Steemit and how it brings the money back to the users. My hats off to the creators for at least making the attempt. I truly hope that the issues it has (including the ones mentioned above) can be dealt with before people lose interest altogether. I plan on putting doing my part in helping this community grow. XO
Thanks, I like the fact that you are questioning how things work and looking for better ways to make our experiences here exciting and rewarding.
I have done none of what you suggest; no promoting, a few resteems that I wanted to make certain I have in my Blog, so that I can re-examine whenever I want (and it keeps me aware of the name of the poster, since names of followers are too many for them to mean much), and, as for the bots, I see them, when I'm in a good mood I may give it one upvote, but otherwise, the pleasures I get from Steemit are:
a) Posting my stories (I know that nobody reads them, but it does not matter, though I admit, their loss is not my gain).
b) Exploring posts by others and meeting some wonderful (and wonderfully interesting) people. Being the typical elderly man on a pension, I spend my days in my room, only going out for groceries, so this aspect is very important to me.
c) I know there was a (c), but I've forgotten what it was...oh yes! I get to see some amazingly good art, read poems and stories by others and, the most exciting for me, is that I rarely find someone with talent who is just starting out and I am offered the opportunity to encourage them. The talent of each new generation is the promise of close to eternal life for Mankind that I search for
I see those who concentrate on following everyone and their rep goes up fast, without any original posting, but I do not envy them. I only envy those with talent. I hope your ideas help them, for many of them need Steemit to enable them to concentrate on their talent, rather than holding some shitty, soul-numbing job.
On their behalf, I thank you for your attempts and interest.
What a great summary! If only more people had your wisdom! Thanks!
the drawback issue can be solved by adding different priority cycles in ring models to rate different sections . The difficulties in the different cases are the tops and lows because they overlap with sections above and under them.
Sounds interesting... I'm not familiar with ring models. I'll have to look into it. Thanks!
Pay per click would be great.