Idea: The system should reduce the payout for the use of the most popular tags
Hello there, here is another idea I have that might improve Steemit. It would be a penalty to the payout of a post that uses one or more of the most popular tags. Popularity of a tag would be defined in terms of payouts each tag receives.
The system is aware of how much payout each tag receives:
https://steemit.com/tags.html/trending
Here is how it might work:
- Using the most popular tag (highest payout) would reduce the payout of the post by 20%.
- Second most popular: 15% penalty
- Third most popular: 10% penalty
- Fourth most popular: 5% penalty
- No penalty for using any other tag.
If a post is using more than one of the penalized tags, only the worst penalty would be applied. They would not add up.
What is the purpose of this penalty? It would do two things:
- It would help reduce tag spam. Since there is a price to pay for using a popular tag, a poster would have to carefully consider the pros and cons.
- It would encourage posters to write articles on a wider variety of topics. Right now, it feels like 50% of every post here is about #steemit (including this one!) If you write a post on the most popular topic, you're sure to get tons of views, but you'll have to balance that against a 20% reduction in the posts payout.
great ideas @neoxian - I think that just as we have a preview pane, as the user adds these notorious tags a warning pops up letting them know the opportunity cost by doing so or by having a payout potential readout on the side (in the preview pane). Otherwise, the masses are never going to know or have a clue about these granular facets of the system.
Yes, making these types of things crystal clear in the interface is very important!
I've thought of a modification upon your idea that will fix the problem, while also creating more general fairness.
Instead of limiting the income based on tags, what if we reduce or boost the income per upvote based on how much a post has already made?
Because of the nature of this sort of vote limiting, it'd mean that if a post has below $500 or so, each upvote might be worth 100%+ what it's normally worth, while a post that's above $500 or so, each vote is worth 80% or something. It'd scale based on the average profits of all posts.
Basically, voting for something already profiting doesn't provide as much benefit as voting for something still obscure. The percentage increase and decrease also means that tiny baby dolphins whose vote is normally worth 0 or 1 cent or something pitiful and small, now has a slightly more powerful vote when voting for something still obscure.
Just my two cents.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Two counter points:
Yes, I do notice that my idea has nothing to do with fixing the tagging issue.
And your second point is also quite right.
Thank you for your counter points.
@heretikitten
You be lucky to get some curator or upvote point.
Most of the time Zero.
I am trying different techniques everyday.
As long I am not the whales snack.
I stay away from them.
Just double your two cents.
This sounds like a good idea, but I think over time this:
will happen naturally and whales/dolphins will balance out rewards over other tags too. But until then this could be something beneficial to the rest of the community with lower SP. Good idea.
I'm not convinced that this will happen naturally, but I hope you are right.
Try #steem-ideas or #steemit-ideas
So far this is the best solution I've seen for the tagging issues.
There are some pretty good ideas in that post, thanks!
The only thing I see that this could help is people to stop using the steemit tag for everything they post, won't help for much else... having photography and introduceyourself pretty much always in the top 5 people won't stop using these when they are what they write about anyway. So they will just have to get a penalty for using them... as far as encouraging people to write about other things, don't think so.
You might be surprised how money motivates.
The goals isn't to stop people from posting photography or introductions. Plenty of people would still do this, and that's fine. It would just be a gentle nudge to encourage posts on different topics. Also, #photography and #introduceyourself are two heavily abused tags.
Even if this was all my idea accomplished, it would be totally worth it.
That is true... :)
Excellent idea @neoxian
I am creating my own new tags for now to use.
No penalties applies.
Sweet ❤️👍
Supported 👍
You made some good points... I think most people just use #steemit just so there blog is seen and also might of run out of categories to choose from.
it will generate a new "tag wars".
Everyone could add tags like st33m, steeem, steem--it, ste-emit etc...
I don't see any harm in that. You are just hurting yourself if you use some bizarre tag.
Good idea this would make people think twice before they post the most popular tags. But what if you use a tag that isn't popular?
Then that's fine?
I think tags #notmine will be popular in the future.
I have one #nothingtotag