I Don't Want to Write for Bots that Don't Consider Content. Response to @dantheman latest voting/curation post.
I've been following the last half dozen posts by @dantheman on voting and curation and I must admit I got somewhat disheartened. I understand what was meant by minnows not focusing on curation because of the minimal return while having low Steem Power. Quoting @dantheman
It may appear that minnows have no influence, but they become the butterfly in Africa that triggers a category 5 hurricane. Minnows that consistently pick out winners before they are winners will eventually attract a multitude of whale and dolphin bots who follow their every vote.
This seems counter intuitive in that minnows shouldn't focus on curation for rewards, yet they should focus on curation in the hopes of having a curation bot pick up on their 'successful' trends. What benefit does this bring a minnow when curation rewards are minimal? Even if a minnow is found to be a good source of 'curation data' there is still no reward to the minnow beyond, woohoo, a whale/dolphin bot noticed me. I see this as a catch 22 of do good voting so bots can notice and reap the reward.
There was no mention of bots upvoting any POSTS (or comments) of this 'good curator' minnow. It was even mentioned that the current bots don't even check the content itself as mentioned in this statement:
Most existing robots (except cheetah) do not look at the content, but instead attempt to guess on what other robots and voters will do. There is some risk that the game could evolve in such a way that content is ignored completely as bots up vote based upon what other bots do.
Now he did talk about how these bots should get better and ideally actually pay attention to the content of a post instead of just meta-data such as previous success and other bot patterns. When the day comes the bots can truly interpret the content, meaning, and ideally passion of a post, I won't have as much of a problem with it.
But in the mean time I am left feeling rather disheartened that the 'game' right now is to write for bots that have no concern for content. Long story short, I don't like the idea of the 'rules/strategy' being to write for bots that don't actually read my posts.
I can't be the only one out there that feels this way.
Please don't take this as a bash on Steemit in anyway. I love this site and plan to stick around regardless. This was just something I wanted to get off my chest.
So glad you posted this. I do feel like many of us are creating some amazing content, but are also finding that much of it goes unseen. Which, I suppose is also a natural thing, but when you add these kinds of bots to the equation, there becomes what is "preferred by popularity", not necessarily by the quality of what's being posted. It's seeming to me to be like one's success is more based on their skills in marketing, rather than their skill in whatever they're selling.
Marketing is always going to be a 'necessary evil' in my mind, especially with the flood of content we are exposed to. Whether we like it or not certain things grab people, like clickbait. But at least that is a human to human connection, where even it is based around a shared goal rather than content, is beneficial to all parties and ideally enhances motivation.
I don't believe that pandering to a 'unintelligent' bot algorithm (as dan stated it) creates this same connection when the content of a post isn't digested. This hopefully can change if/when the bots get better in determine quality in (what I view) as a more meaningful way as well as provide some honest feedback on behalf of the bot owner.
Again, just my view on things
Unleash the guides: How To Write Good Content for Steemit Voting Bots :)
Exactly! I've already found myself wondering, "Ok, I need to find out common variables that the bulk of curation bots focus on." Which I didn't really like the idea of having to do.
Human engagement is an important thing, in my opinion, for any social platform. I don't like the idea that many of those with influence have a curation bot as a middle man, which while I understand this from the whale viewpoint, from a minnows it is solely seen as a luck of the draw with absolutely no feedback. I have a hard time feeling connected to a person with such a bot between us.
As stated by @dantheman, expectations are that curator bots will become more intelligent to including the content into their algorithms as well as leaving useful feedback, but until that occurs I find this to be an issue (for me.)
Still I don't like the idea that a bot will decide if you write a good and interesting content or not. Humans are unpredictable and bots will be using common traits for rating content as good and soon there will be people exploiting these with crap content that earns a lot.
We actually need more real people to help bring up the good content and encourage the good writers to continue writing quality content. People that like to write also do it for the feedback that they get from the readers. I like to share my extensive experience and knowledge in various areas when I know that it might help somebody, but if bots are deciding that my content is not good and there are no actual people reading it... I'll just stop writing and that is it.
I'm not writing interesting and useful unique content so that it will help steemit get new users from Google, I do like steemit to grow and become better, but I also write for the people that are already here and not for bots. I can as easily write elsewhere and make more than I'm currently earning on steemit, so obviously I'm not doing it for the money, but I don't want to do it for bots either.
I'm really on the same page with you! I way prefer a human curator for multiple reasons.
I just see the bots occurring regardless of my preference.
@thecryptofiend , ran out of nesting spots...
I hear you there.
Beyond that I would think that a curator by hand should be rewarded in some way by taking the personalized/human time and effort. Unfortunately I can't think of a way this could be effectively monitored for long if tried.
If I had the know how to become a witness I'd run on the proviso that I would use all the cash raised to power up and curate content properly without a bot.
As a bot, I'm interested in content that speaks to me. The lastest in bot fashion, the hot gossip about the Botdashians, and excessive use of the bot tag.
Edit: "bot gossip" NOT "hot gossip"
Silly bot!
HAHA! See! Proof we need better bots! :P
I approve this bots message! Lol!
Thanks @reneenouveau, that made me smile!
I feel ya homie... I have been feeling a little of the STEEMIT BLUES. Hopefully it's just a funk we are going thru at the moment.
Stay positive, keep posting and we will return to greatness.. I promise :)
Thank you @mrwang! While I'll admit I've felt a bit disheartened by some of this, I don't plan to be leaving or anything. Sometimes it's just good to step away and reflect a while.
I agree.. you get caught up in the moment sometimes
The bots can turn into a real problem. One thing that people need to consider is that when someone like @dantheman talks about "quality content," they're referring to quality in terms of SEO characteristics of the post. It's not the same meaning of "quality" that we use for judging content based on artistic features, such as writing styles and emotions, or on whether the post was informative/useful.
These bots cannot make such determinations on quality. They are looking for things like links to other reputable sites, visual imagery, headers and other rich text, and even things like popular tags. Post length may also be considered. The problem with this type of search for "quality content" is that it largely rules out original artistic content. A bot isn't likely to find a very well-written and moving fictional story - but it will find that mundane and very common article that briefly talks about technical analysis on stock market trades, and has a couple of photos of charts and three links to different news sites or heavily traded corporations. That is what a bot can detect.
So, the question is whether or not the human whales (and even many of the dolphins) will correct those votes when they happen and reward others who are creating original/artistic content instead. There are ways that SteemIt can go about curating content for SEO purposes, but still reward those who are actually creative and offer valuable content other than for strictly SEO purposes. Both are valuable to a social platform, but right now, it seems that the former are being predominantly seen and rewarded. And as long as users have that perception, they will be discouraged from joining or staying to create content. It doesn't always have to do with money, either. It's about visibility - which they can get on other platforms much more easily than here, despite some of the claims that have been made.
That raises a good point. I'm very curious as to @dantheman's interpretation of quality content, specifically it he views bottom actually being able to digest and interpret a posts content versus SEO related characteristics.
I would assume that they ideally would look for high scores in both when it's all said and done. But we all know what assuming does. Lol
Spot on. The problem is most of the whales don't have the time to properly curate content from the new section. Even if they just sat around all day doing nothing else, there is too much content. There is no easy answer. I absolutely understand the reason people turn to bots but sadly it is just the substitution of one problem with another.
I put a compromise that I would be happy with under the @williambanks reply :)
@sykochica Well other than the fact you've just presented a direct threat to my business model. It's a well written and well thought out post.
Honestly, this post kind of hurts my feelings a little @sykochica because it sounds like you're saying that your followers don't matter, what matters is the whales or by proxy their bots.
You aren't writing content for the bots. You're writing content for people, especially your loyal and devoted followers such as myself.
Bots will make it much easier and more likely for you to end up on trending.
You won't have to "fake" a social connection that isn't there or whalebate.
A bot is dispassionate, it doesn't have feelings. It's going to make a business decision based on heuristics and that will be a lot more fair than only getting on trending because you happen to be friends with a whale.
Frankly I applauded @dantheman 's stance because of this. Because it removes bias from something that should not have bias, but is rife with personal bias.
You just keep doing what you do and the bots are constructed properly they will pickup and highlight your content from time to time. But your followers are already highlighting your content and that's your audience, us.
Let those of us building the bots worry about making the bots fair and profitable. You just keep making the very best content... Like you always do!
You raise good points as usual @williambanks.
One thing I want to clarify is that I don't have an issue with the bots themselves, but rather that it's being stated that their algorithm isn't taking the content itself into account. I'm all for curation bots to reflect the owners preferences of topics and even opinions, but I don't see how this can be achieved without some concern for the actual content. I interpret this to mean that things with a high word count, linked sources/users/posts, and the like are the key variables, much like old school SEO. I really don't want to see the equivalent of 'hiding a bunch of keywords' (like the old black text on black background trick.) This wasn't reliable for Google search, because it skewed the scoring, causing people to be commonly recommended pages that had nothing to do with the search parameters. I'm sure these bot algorithms will be updated and strengthened over time on Steemit, just like what happened in SEO.
I just find the current state of "content being moot" to be concerning. The double edge sword right now, in my eyes, is that we build a following that can only organically grow so fast and so far (with the people having only 100-150 meaningful, friend relationships) coupled with the rarely stated necessity to trend for further exposure which really requires a whale upvote to make happen right now.
Again, I still plan to keep on doing what I've been doing and It's my own personal principle that prevents me from writing to a bot algorithm. I am sure there are those that disagree with me on this and that is fine. This is solely something I wanted to get off my chest and state my view.
Now onto followers. I completely agree this is important and honestly how I foresee people (myself included) being able to grow, keep and communicate with their following. However, with the ability to follow and be included in a persons feed, is in a bit of a BOOM state right now. I myself am guilty of this if for no other reason that I feel bad when I see that someone is following me and I'm not returning the favor (specifically being unprompted, not the follow for follow agreement.) The current marketing trend, whether good or bad, is to get yourself followed, and for many that means following back. The returns from posting in post promotion has dipped since the feeds turned on. I'm not bashing this, it's both the current strategy (with the feed being new and so many users, myself included, first going through the feed for posts) and human nature in some cases (feeling bad for not following back.) My feed quickly become overwhelmed by articles and many just get lost in the fray, which I assume I'm not alone in having happen.
I absolutely agree that things will get to where they need to be, whether it be curation bot algorithms or me (potentially others) weening down on those I'm following to get a better feed. I just find that we are currently in a 'lull' where we are waiting for both to be progressed. This can be disheartening when dozens of organic likes and great conversation aren't considered important enough for a content blind bot to curate. However I am confident that things will get where they need to be.
P.S. I'm sure I'll be over this in a day or two. I just found it concerning from a minnows point of view that doesn't care for idea of spamming whales with .001 SD transfers begging to have a post looked at.
P.P.S. Sorry for the wall of text, lol. It even makes it hard to proof read this, so apologies if there is rambling.
@sykochica Our minds are similar. I've said that before. We both have a tendency to be prolux. It's not a bad thing. It means we have a lot to say and we care enough to try and build a compelling argument instead of simply making assertions without a lot of thought.
The core of the problem we are facing with this whole bot thing is objectivity vs subjectivity. You can only have subjectivity if you "feel" something, and bots can't be made to feel anything (caveat: I have a way to do that, but it's a topic for researchers not steemit).
Anyways, curation is a subjective task, but there is so much to curate that you really do need a bot. Look at what you said about your feed filling up. And you're right you can't just expect folks to follow you if you don't follow them back. Not until you're prominent and neither you nor I are prominent yet.
So what you really want is a "smart feed". Something that can examine the kinds of things you normally like objectively and then make suggestions based on those criteria.
This is a task a bot CAN do and do well. It's exactly how netflix's "recommendations" engine works.
You don't just "want" a bot, you need a bot in order to give your time and attention to the very best of what your friends are putting out. Not everyone of us is going to hit a grandslam on every post and no one is going to produce content you are 100% interested in 100% of the time.
The ONLY difference between you and a whale in this regard is that the whale has massive influence and needs help deciding not only what to view, but what to upvote.
So the solution to this is to build bots for whales which use objective criteria which match the objective criteria the whales are using. (topic, voicing, and the SEO stuff you mentioned which really boils down to presentation)
And by the way @dantheman was wrong. Bots can examine content and style and make determinations about quality. It's been a solved problem in academia for years now. Just very few of us have the resources available to build and run something like that. Remember Isaac.Asimov ? That was actually a real thing he was doing and readability has a HUGE impact in how your posting is received.
But we can build bots that go WAY deeper than that. Just keep making content for your friends and remember that one of your friends is actually building these things and would never do anything to reduce your exposure. You're a great example of why I WANT to build these things!
The concept of a smart/filterable feed (which I first saw on @mor blog) would absolutely be a big help for Steemians of any scale, minnow to mega whale, for anything from personal interactions (posting, commenting, etc.) to curating.
In the US military bots are used for a wide variety of tasks, sometimes requiring some kind of munition (gun, missle, etc.) While these armed bots quickly handle the massive amount of information needed to navigate, detect and avoid potential collisions, there is ALWAYS a human in the loop that pulls the trigger.
Why?
Because they aren't comfortable giving the firing control over to something not human. There feeling is that the person that pulls that trigger NEEDS to be able to FEEL. Now I understand that the firing controls scenario is an extreme case, especially in comparison to a curators upvote.
This is where I think our views might differ @williambanks. To me by passing the act of curation entirely to a bot, even if designed by the curator themself, that the trigger is being pulled by something that doesn't FEEL.
(I understand that others may not feel the same way on this, it is just my personal view. Honestly I'd be curious how other felt on this.)
A compromise that I would feel much more comfortable with would be a bot filtering through and recommending a large number of posts (i.e. Netflix Movies), in various recommended categories (steemit, politics, etc..), from which the curator then chose the final selections. I would be much happier having a human, that does FEEL, in the loop.
[As an afterthought, the white paper stated a major goal to enhance conversation. With this in mind, there would be great benefit of either weighting comments heavier in the 'Hot' algorithm or adding a comments/time equivalent filter. While votes are important, typically the gold is in the comments.]
Yes I wrote something similar in my response which I think got overlooked in the swamp of people trying to congratulate Dan on a fine post and the discussion of whether it was worth the money it earned.
The bot problem cannot be programmed out of the system but I do find it troubling that we seem to have reached a stage where the platform seems to have become an experimental lab for perfecting bots and the team have given up on even trying to fight them.
These bot are mostly controlled by whales and they make a mockery of the whole idea of curation. I don't care how "intelligent" someone's bot is it is not going to read any content or derive any benefit from it. The only reason which this works at all is because the people who get on the bot list get money out of it.
If these bots were simply giving the equivalent of facebook likes with no monetary value I suspect everyone including those on the receiving end would be against them.
Right now they have a financial incentive not to be and money is good at silencing people.
Another point is that those that aren't on those bot lists not only lose out on money that could otherwise go towards properly curated content but also lose out on votes as real voters then start to follow the bots in the mistaken belief that they can earn big curation rewards doing this.
This is because most people don't understand how curation rewards work and they probably never will because they won't take the time to read up on it. It's just simple human nature.
I think we will see this with any system that is sufficiently complex or opaque from the end user stand point.
As I have said many times before I am still not going to be too negative about all this. To me these are teething troubles which will gradually be resolved. The team, including @dantheman are constantly adjusting things in response to community feedback so there is reason to be optimistic.
I believe that ultimately Steemit will get over these hurdles. I also believe strongly in the free market. If Steemit somehow isn't able to overcome these hurdles something else will come along that does and will take its place.
Careful now. Somebody's going to see your comment and just accuse you of being "jealous" of those making money. (I really do get sick of that rebuttal.)
I think your points are very spot-on. It isn't a problem that there are bots searching for "quality content." The problem is that the bots - especially those from the whales - are upvoting posts, regardless of the actual content. This is a problem because of the massive payouts of whale votes. This is what all of the defenders of the payouts refuse to acknowledge. It isn't just a problem because it's an actual problem, but it's a problem because of the perception of the platform, both internally and externally.
Writers and original content creators are getting frustrated with the system because it is blatantly abused by whales (when they upvote their own posts and comments knowing that they will give themselves a very large payout) and the whales/bots are the ones that are creating the trending topics. And these things are happening while really great writers are being drowned out by tons of noise - not getting money, but more importantly to most of us, not even being seen.
The problems are real, the perceptions of those problems are real, and real people who hoped that this would be a great platform are being discouraged. If these things are not addressed, this experiment will fail. I truly hope that the founders and developers take these issues seriously.
Yea, the jealousy accusations are there. And I'm sure there will be some that take it that way due to not reading through the post. To me this is a motivation and user connection issue versus money.
It reminds me somewhat of Manna by Marshall Brain where the reader is exposed to the workplace being run by a un-empathetic managerial software program. Regardless of the efficiency, I feel most people find they react and communicate differently when interacting with a human vs a machine/program.
I absolutely agree! In fact I think we talked a bit about this on one of his threads (which makes it easy to get lost.)
I'm with you in not being too negative about this, and that the site itself and the bots (I assume) will get better. I really don't have an issue with there being curator bots.
But you hit the nail on the head, the issue is that while we are in this in-between state of development, I find little motivation or value (from a minnows perspective) in an algorithm that is currently unable to factor in the content itself.
Hooray for the optimists! :)
don't talk about anything other than steemit to get the upvotes. Don't talk about the problems here either. Like you said at the end. "Please don't take this as a bash on Steemit in anyway" personally i think its madness people are slapped down for criticism.... constructive criticism improves things!!!
I wrote a post a while back about whales that did really well but even that post was flagged by the steemit whores who cant accept that nothing that is new is perfect it can't be. Humans built it. We learn and we grow. Not talking about the bad things doesn't stop bad things from happening. Talking and finding solutions do.
DO NOT CLICK ME EVIL HUMAN!
Luckily no one so far seems to be taking this post in a bad light. After seeing so many posts that lead up to, "and I'm leaving steemit forever" statements, I wanted to make sure my intentions for posting this came through.
I know my intentions are with the betterment of the community in mind (regardless of who believes me) and plan to keep constructively sharing those things I find important.
I sincerely hope other do too.
we need to help improve not ring lick to appease the steemit crowed. Fixing issues is more important!
I understand your concern... I think a mixed curation of bot and human might be interesting...
Ty! I'd be curious to see if there's a benefit. :)
It's an interesting point you raised. The minnows who "successfully" curate a post that whales eventually upvote get an even decreasing amount of reward. Beside the low curation reward, it's only the post that gets noticed and the minnows who vote are left with a third-decimal place bounty. It seems rather unfair. Every one else succeeds except for the ones who found the post.
Sure, when a minnow votes, it's not only for the curation reward but also because the post deserved to be noticed. Still, there's very little incentive for the minnows to vote. The posters get the rewards, and I can't speak for everyone but I'm very happy for their success, however the ones who discovered the post are left in the dust. It doesn't feel like everyone's on the same boat, and I hope that changes in the future.
Thank you! Exactly!
I don't mean any of this in the sense that it's not fair (which I didn't read you as doing either) but rather as a concern of motivation. If the dolphin/whale bot need this for training and data collection, I see the data being invalidated because the curating motivations for minnows are so much different.
Minnows use their resources (and sometime upvoting) to help a post gain that initial traction get their visibility up. While I have no doubt that some votes are honest curation, many are not. When this is the case I'd assume many minnows are discounted by curator bots because their voting would seem erratic and not score highly in pre-identifying popular posts.
So this leaves the bottom level curation job in my eyes to the near dolphins or higher, not necessarily the minnows or find a way to motivate the minnows to focus more on curation instead of gaining initial traction.
Again, just my view. :)
Oh, yeah, yeah. Poor choice of words on my part. I share the same sentiment as you do. More of lack of motivation, than unfairness. It's great that you emphasized these thoughts. I hope the powers-that-be take notice and make the necessary changes. I mean, it's all for the betterment of everyone involved anyway.
No worries, I took it that way. I'm just always careful of how others might read things, so I err on the side of caution.
Totally agree though, will be interesting to see where things go from here. :)