RE: Improving Steem’s rankings to cater to diverse content preferences
Would Steem fail if every blog post of a lady putting on her makeup is rewarded $26,000?
I don't know that it would (FWIW, I do not believe that every such post would be so rewarded, only the first that emerged as a hit or others that offered something new). Look around you. The most commercially successful music is cookie cutter. The most successful TV shows are dumb. Nobody even buys books any more at all (other than maybe romance novels?). One of the top posts at reddit right now (5000 votes) is: "Excluding my mom, what's the worst sex you've ever had?"
What is successful is what addresses the market as it exists, and that includes a great deal of demand for shallow content and being popular for being popular.
Also, implemention factors are very important. Voting is processed by the consensus code which needs to not only be kept relatively simple but also very high performance. This doesn't mean that your ideas can't work but to be a credible proposal you need to completely specify how and when the various processing steps occur. Of course that can be the subject of later posts.
I realize that opening statement could be interpreted the way you did. Rather I intended it in the context of the article, meaning that given the current optimum voting strategy of each voter maximizing his/her reward by choosing to vote on the posts with the highest $rewards, then there will always be some post that is awarded far too much while so many others are rewarded far too little. Btw, my proposal isn't intended to entirely interfere with the intended psychology effect of quadratic weighting of voting power which the white paper says is intended to motivate blog posters by causing them to incorrectly assess the odds of their likely average reward. Rather my proposal is merely so that the voting power isn’t incorrectly incentivized to vote as a groupthink monolith. I realize some people may be voting their conscience in spite of it not maximizing their curation rewards, but still my proposal benefits them because their conscience will then actually be more highly reflected in the ranking for the cluster that shares the same like-mindedness.
My rebuttal to the claim that one-size-fits-all content is what the masses want, is to observe the decline in viewership of non-interactive media (e.g. newspapers and TV) since the Internet. Apparently the masses want to customize their experience with media, while sharing that experience/content with like-minded community (and 5000 people in a like-minded cluster is sufficient socializing and good feeling being a member of a group that shares interests). Meaning I agree and disagree with you, in that yes masses want to share things that many others also like, but they want to prioritize their sharing around their mutual likes, not everything under the sun. And they probably do also want to venture outside their priority interests sometimes to see what is going on outside. Even my 26 year old filipina gf tells me she doesn't like seeing violent sharings on her Facebook timeline. She wants cutesy and humorous content, e.g. dogs dancing, etc.. She would have absolutely no interest in reading this proposal. But she will partake of an occasional guy who got crushed under a bus (or apparently a pornographic scandal she did not tell me about lol).
Given the millions of users who visit Reddit every day, 5000 up votes seems quite low. This seems to confirm that millions of viewers are being spammed with content they probably aren’t interested in. We might have an opportunity to improve upon Reddit’s ranking algorithm.
A “Trending for Others” ranking choice could still provide the original unclustered rankings when users want to venture outside their voting preferences. These could even be sparsely interleaved by the UI in the clustered rankings to provide some statistical opportunities for users to morph their voting preferences and not get stuck in a localized groupthink. Yeah we probably need both! Good point.
Note none of the reduces the other main benefit of my proposal which is that curator rewards would be confined to clusters, to remove the incentive for voting in one global groupthink.
The voting is recorded on the blockchain in I presume real-time, but the rewards are only recorded periodically. Note the rankings and rewards can be computed in real-time for the UI independently of the consensus validators. Thus afaics, it is only when the rewards need to be periodically recorded that those computations need to be performed by the consensus validators. Thus it appears the cost can perhaps be amortized over significant periods.
Agree overall on most most points. Re. implementation, payouts are transactions too. Currently those perform a relatively simple calculations based on shares, and those transactions would need to remain limited in computational cost. I don't think this proposal changes that much though, it just has more complicated (but still computationally simple) accounting of shares by clutser. My concern is primarily the k-means clustering; Incremental k-means variants exist, so it is probably solvable.
Also, dividing users into clusters requires a minimum number of users in each cluster, thus a minimum number of users on the site as a while. At present I doubt that is feasible as the number of users on the site is just barely reaching the point where it works at all. Ideally of course the number of users will be much larger in the future, so something like this could be phased in.
Pleas check out this post I made about a steemit Bug the dev's should see this post so they can fix it. https://steemit.com/bug/@stijn/steemit-bug-needs-to-be-fixed
You are right about that but I think if the interface had clearly defined groups like Reddit, which were moderated like Reddit or Facebook, where only people in that group selected as moderators can determine for example to allow a post into that topic, then maybe you can focus the curation per topic.
Right now if I check the basic income topic I can't find anything related to basic income without digging through all sorts of noise.
It would help but not resolve the main issue. Currently users are rewarded more to rewarding content creators with the highest rewards rather than best content.
The best content is subjective. The only way to determine best is to go by rank and the only rank we have is votes. So the most votes is considered the best by the community. No different from Reddit or Slashdot or any other collaborative filtering.
Afaics, my proposal when orthogonally clustered per topic (aka tag or hashtag) would automatically (i.e. algorithmically) accomplish the same by ranking the irrelevant posts at the bottom of the list of posts for the topic, without needing to manually pick and trust moderators.
True, but hypothetically my clustering proposal should offer the advantage that rankings are customized for each cluster, i.e. for each group of people who tend to vote with the same preferences, thus automatically customizing rankings to different people’s likes (up votes) and dislikes (down votes).
Not all votes are equal. Rich/Powerful voters have more important vites.