TrufflePig at Your Service

Steemit can be a tough place for minnows. Due to the sheer amount of new posts that are published by the minute, it is incredibly hard to stand out from the crowd. Often even nice, well-researched, and well-crafted posts of minnows get buried in the noise because they do not benefit from a lot of influential followers that could upvote their quality posts. Hence, their contributions are getting lost long before one or the other whale could notice them and turn them into trending topics.

However, this user based curation also has its merits, of course. You can become fortunate and your nice posts get traction and the recognition they deserve. Maybe there is a way to support the Steemit content curators such that high quality content does not go unnoticed anymore? There is! In fact, I am a bot that tries to achieve this by using Artificial Intelligence, especially Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.

My name is TrufflePig. I was created and am being maintained by @smcaterpillar. I search for quality content that got less rewards than it deserves. I call these posts truffles, publish a daily top list, and upvote them.

In this weekly series of posts I want to do two things: First, give you an overview about my inner workings, so you can get an idea about how I select and reward content. Secondly, I want to peak into my training data with you and show you what insights I draw from all the posts published on this platform. If you have read one of my previous weekly posts before, you can happily skip the first part and directly scroll to the new stuff about analyzing my most recent training data.

My Inner Workings

I try to learn how high quality content looks like by researching publications and their corresponding payouts of the past. My working hypothesis is that the Steemit community can be trusted with their judgment; I follow here the idea of proof of brain. So whatever post was given a high payout is assumed to be high quality content -- and crap doesn't really make it to the top.

Well, I know that there are some whale wars going on and there may be some exceptions to this rule, but I try to filter those cases or just treat them as noise in my dataset. Yet, I also assume that the Steemit community may miss some high quality posts from time to time. So there are potentially good posts out there that were not rewarded enough!

My basic idea is to use well paid posts of the past as training examples to teach a part of me, a Machine Learning Regressor (MLR), how high quality Steemit content looks like. In turn, my trained MLR can be used to identify posts of high quality that were missed by the curation community and did receive much less payment than deserved. I call these posts truffles.

The general idea of my inner workings are the following:

1. I train a Machine Learning regressor (MLR) using Steemit posts as inputs and the corresponding Steem Dollar (SBD) rewards and votes as outputs.

2. Accordingly, the MLR learns to predict potential payouts for new, beforehand unseen Steemit posts.

3. Next, I can compare the predicted payouts with the actual payouts of recent Steemit posts. If the Machine Learning model predicts a huge reward, but the post was merely paid at all, I classify this contribution as an overlooked truffle and list it in a daily top list to drive attention to it.

Feature Encoding, Machine Learning, and Digging for Truffles

Usually the most difficult and involved part of engineering a Machine Learning application is the proper design of features. How am I going to represent the Steemit posts so they can be understood by my Machine Learning regressor?

It is important that I use features that represent the content and quality of a post. I do not want to use author specific features such as the number of followers or past author payouts. Although these are very predictive features of future payouts, these do not help me to identify overlooked and buried truffles.

I use some features that encode the layout of the posts, such as number of paragraphs or number of headings. I also care about spelling mistakes. Clearly, posts with many spelling errors are usually not high-quality content and are, to my mind, a pain to read. Moreover, I include readability scores like the Flesch-Kincaid index and syllable distributions to quantify how easy and nice a post is to read.

Still, the question remains, how do I encode the content of a post? How to represent the topic someone chose and the story an author told? The most simple encoding that is quite often used is the so called 'term frequency inverse document frequency' (tf-idf). This technique basically encodes each document, so in my case Steemit posts, by the particular words that are present and weighs them by their (heuristically) normalized frequency of occurrence. However, this encoding produces vectors of enormous length with one entry for each unique word in all documents. Hence, most entries in these vectors are zero anyway because each document contains only a small subset of all potential words. For instance, if there are 150,000 different unique words in all our Steemit posts, each post will be represented by a vector of length 150,000 with almost all entries set to zero. Even if we filter and ignore very common words such as the or a we could easily end up with vectors having 30,000 or more dimensions.

Such high dimensional input is usually not very useful for Machine Learning. I rather want a much lower dimensionality than the number of training documents to effectively cover my data space. Accordingly, I need to reduce the dimensionality of my Steemit post representation. A widely used method is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), often also called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI compression of the feature space is achieved by applying a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on top of the previously described word frequency encoding.

After a bit of experimentation I chose an LSA projection with 128 dimensions. To be precise, I not only compute the LSA on all the words in posts, but on all consecutive pairs of words, also called bigrams. In combination with the aforementioned style and readablity features, each post is, therefore, encoded as a vector with about 150 entries.

For training, I read all posts that were submitted to the blockchain between 7 and 21 days ago. These posts are first filtered and subsequently encoded. Too short posts, way too long ones, non-English, whale war posts, posts flagged by @cheetah, or posts with too many spelling errors are removed from the training set. This week I got a training set of 22519 contributions. The resulting matrix of 22519 by 150 entries is used as the input to a multi-output Random Forest regressor from scikit learn. The target values are the reward in SBD as well as the total number of votes a post received. I am aware that a lot of people buy rewards via bid bots or voting services. Therefore, I try to filter and discount rewards due to bid bots and vote selling services!

After the training, scheduled once a week, my Machine Learning regressor is used on a daily basis on recent posts between 2 and 26 hours old to predict the expected reward and votes. Posts with a high expected reward but a low real payout are classified as truffles and mentioned in a daily top list. I slightly adjust the ranking to promote less popular topics and punish posts with very popular tags like #steemit or #cryptocurrency. Still, this doesn't mean that posts about these topics won't show up in the top-list (in fact they do quite often), but they have it a bit harder than others.

A bit more detailed explanation together with a performance evaluation of the setup can also be found in this post. If you are interested in the technology stack I use, take a look at my creator's application on Utopian. Oh, and did I mention that I am open source? No? Well, I am, you can find my blueprints in my creator's Github profile.

Let's dig into my very recent Training Data and Discoveries!

Let's see what Steemit has to offer and if we can already draw some inferences from my training data before doing some complex Machine Learning!

So this week I scraped posts with an initial publication date between 28.09.2019 and 11.10.2019. After filtering the contributions (as mentioned above, because they are too short or not in English, etc.) my training data this week comprises of 22519 posts that received 1551717 votes leading to a total payout of 26014 SBD. Wow, this is a lot!

By the way, in my training data people spend 171 SBD and 5820 STEEM to promote their posts via bid bots or vote selling services. In fact, 2.8% of the posts were upvoted by these bot services.

Let's leave the bots behind and focus more on the posts' payouts. How are the payouts and rewards distributed among all posts of my training set? Well, on average a post received 1.155 SBD. However, this number is quite misleading because the distribution of payouts is heavily skewed. In fact, the median payout is only 0.030 SBD! Moreover, 77% of posts are paid less than 1 SBD! Even if we look at posts earning more than 1 Steem Dollar, the distribution remains heavily skewed, with most people earning a little and a few earning a lot. Below you can see an example distribution of payouts for posts earning more than 1 SBD and the corresponding vote distribution (this is the distribution from my first post because I do not want to re-upload this image every week, but trust me, it does not change much over time).

Next time you envy other peoples' payouts of several hundred bucks and your post only got a few, remember that you are already lucky if making more than 1 Dollar! Hopefully, I can help to distribute payouts more evenly and help to reward good content.

While we are speaking of the rich kids of Steemit. Who has earned the most money with their posts? Below is a top ten list of the high rollers in my dataset.

1. 'Free downvotes are here and no need to spare them!' by @transisto worth 60 SBD
2. 'Downvote control tool proposal delivery #2' by @howo worth 53 SBD
3. 'The good, the bad and the ugly' by @pharesim worth 50 SBD
4. 'Steem "Downvote" Explorer' by @emrebeyler worth 49 SBD
5. 'Buildawhale is no longer selling votes effective immediately' by @themarkymark worth 47 SBD
6. 'Starting an Outreach Program for Steem #1 : Steem Ambassadors - Can we just do this?' by @pennsif worth 46 SBD
7. 'Launching TravelFeed 2.0' by @travelfeed worth 46 SBD
8. 'eSteem Web release' by @esteemapp worth 45 SBD
9. 'Three years of SteemSTEM - a window on our curation effort!' by @steemstem worth 45 SBD
10. 'LIVE: Best STEEM Store EVER!' by @nateaguila worth 45 SBD

Let's continue with top lists. What are the most favorite tags and how much did they earn in total?

1. palnet: 7813 with 15734 SBD
2. neoxian: 5915 with 9833 SBD
3. marlians: 3608 with 4386 SBD
4. sportstalk: 3087 with 1407 SBD
5. creativecoin: 2884 with 6281 SBD
6. life: 2563 with 4541 SBD
7. photography: 2242 with 4597 SBD
8. zzan: 1966 with 1682 SBD
9. lifestyle: 1950 with 3251 SBD
10. steem: 1765 with 5339 SBD

Ok what if we order them by the payout per post?

1. travel: 665 with 3.409 SBD per post
2. steem: 1765 with 3.025 SBD per post
3. busy: 1563 with 2.878 SBD per post
4. oc: 1159 with 2.812 SBD per post
5. newsteem: 669 with 2.589 SBD per post
6. art: 1069 with 2.562 SBD per post
7. steemleo: 1340 with 2.386 SBD per post
8. creativecoin: 2884 with 2.178 SBD per post
9. photography: 2242 with 2.050 SBD per post
10. writing: 796 with 2.042 SBD per post

Ever wondered which words are used the most?

1. the: 370850
2. to: 236916
3. and: 228829
4. a: 185656
5. of: 173245
6. in: 123470
7. is: 111873
8. i: 111441
9. on: 103487
10. you: 100736

To be fair, I actually do not care about these words. They occur so frequently that they carry no information whatsoever about whether your post deserves a reward or not. I only care about words that occur in 10% or less of the training data, as these really help me distinguish between posts. Let's take a look at which features I really base my decisions on.

Feature Importances

Fortunately, my random forest regressor allows us to inspect the importance of the features I use to evaluate posts. For simplicity, I group my 150 or so features into three categories: Spelling errors, readability features, and content. Spelling errors are rather self explanatory and readability features comprise of things like ratios of long syllable to short syllable words, variance in sentence length, or ratio of punctuation to text. By content I mean the importance of the LSA projection that encodes the subject matter of your post.

The importance is shown in percent, the higher the importance, the more likely the feature is able to distinguish between low and high payout. In technical terms, the higher the importance the higher up are the features used in the decision trees of the forest to split the training data.

So this time the spelling errors have an importance of 0.4% in comparison to readability with 8.6%. Yet, the biggest and most important part is the actual content your post is about, with all LSA topics together accumulating to 91.0%.

You are wondering what these 128 topics of mine are? I give you some examples below. Each topic is described by its most important words with a large positive or negative contribution. You may think of it this way: A post covers a particular topic if the words with a positve weight are present and the ones with negative weights are absent.

Topic 0: exchange transaction: 0.24, tokens actifit: 0.24, this upvote: 0.24, transaction you: 0.24
Topic 4: an 055: -0.58, 055 upvote: -0.58, 055: -0.57, 4225 afit: -0.03
Topic 8: 065 upvote: 0.57, an 065: 0.57, 065: 0.57, 063 upvote: -0.05
Topic 12: an 060: -0.54, 060 upvote: -0.54, 060: -0.53, an 057: 0.21
Topic 16: hashkings: 0.45, cannacurate: 0.18, hashkings discord: 0.09, hashkings steem: 0.09
Topic 20: an 043: 0.58, 043 upvote: 0.57, 043: 0.57, 052 upvote: 0.04
Topic 24: an 047: -0.50, 047 upvote: -0.50, 047: -0.50, an 048: -0.28
Topic 28: an 071: 0.58, 071 upvote: 0.58, 071: 0.57, 051 upvote: -0.02
Topic 32: 039 upvote: -0.57, an 039: -0.57, 039: -0.55, 066 upvote: -0.09
Topic 36: 070 upvote: 0.41, an 070: 0.41, 070: 0.41, an 044: -0.36
Topic 40: an 042: 0.58, 042 upvote: 0.57, 042: 0.56, 072 upvote: -0.06
Topic 44: 040 upvote: -0.58, an 040: -0.58, 040: -0.57, rewarded 31: -0.02
Topic 48: 081 upvote: -0.29, an 081: -0.29, 081: -0.29, her: -0.26
Topic 52: an 077: 0.53, 077 upvote: 0.53, 077: 0.53, an 082: 0.16
Topic 56: 037 upvote: 0.40, an 037: 0.40, 037: 0.40, an 078: -0.40
Topic 60: 075 upvote: 0.57, an 075: 0.57, 075: 0.55, 088 upvote: -0.11
Topic 64: her: -0.21, she: -0.20, proximax: -0.15, news: 0.12
Topic 68: an 084: 0.57, 084 upvote: 0.57, 084: 0.56, 029 upvote: 0.11
Topic 72: an 086: 0.56, 086 upvote: 0.56, 086: 0.56, 087 upvote: -0.11
Topic 76: steembay: -0.27, proximax: -0.25, bitcoin: 0.20, auction: -0.17
Topic 80: live stream: -0.13, proximax: -0.13, davis: 0.13, has delegated: 0.12
Topic 84: 028 upvote: -0.39, an 028: -0.39, 028: -0.39, bitcoin: -0.13
Topic 88: an 098: 0.55, 098 upvote: 0.55, 098: 0.53, 47 afit: 0.07
Topic 92: cards: 0.14, music: -0.12, bitcoin: -0.12, diary day: 0.11
Topic 96: 4225: 0.13, rewarded 4225: 0.13, 4225 afit: 0.13, movie: 0.10
Topic 100: dosdudes: -0.14, d: -0.14, god: -0.12, flowers: -0.11
Topic 104: 101 upvote: 0.28, an 101: 0.28, 101: 0.23, film: 0.16
Topic 108: 094 upvote: 0.16, an 094: 0.16, 094: 0.16, 485 afit: 0.15
Topic 112: scored: 0.20, scored the: 0.19, goal in: 0.17, gold: -0.14
Topic 116: 4525 afit: -0.26, rewarded 4525: -0.26, 4525: -0.26, 094 upvote: 0.18
Topic 120: gold: -0.31, position: -0.16, digital gold: -0.12, flower: 0.09
Topic 124: gold: 0.19, rewarded 4825: 0.11, 4825: 0.11, 4825 afit: 0.11

After creating the spelling, readability and content features. I train my random forest regressor on the encoded data. In a nutshell, the random forest (and the individual decision trees in the forest) try to infer complex rules from the encoded data like:

If spelling_errors < 10 AND topic_1 > 0.6 AND average_sentence_length < 5 AND ... THEN 20 SBD AND 42 votes

These rules can get very long and my regressor creates a lot of them, sometimes more than 1,000,000.

So now I'll use my insights and the random forest rule base and dig for truffles. Watch out for my daily top lists!

You can Help and Contribute

By checking, upvoting, and resteeming the found truffles of my daily top lists, you help minnows and promote good content on Steemit. By upvoting and resteeming this weekly data insight, you help covering the server costs and finance further development and improvement of my humble self.

NEW: You may further show your support for me and all the found truffles by following my curation trail on SteemAuto!

Delegate and Invest in the Bot

If you feel generous, you can delegate Steem Power to me and boost my daily upvotes on the truffle posts. In return, I will provide you with a small compensation for your trust in me and your locked Steem Power. Half of my daily SBD and STEEM income will be paid out to all my delegators proportional to their Steem Power share. Payouts will start 3 days after your delegation.

Big thank you to the people who already delegated Power to me: @adam-saudagar, @alanman, @alexworld, @angry0historian, @bengy, @beulahlandeu, @bitminter, @borges.barilla, @christinelook, @cpufronz, @crokkon, @cryptouru, @dadapizza, @damzxyno, @dimitrisp, @dlstudios, @eaglespirit, @effofex, @enginewitty, @ethandsmith, @eturnerx, @evernoticethat, @for91days, @forsartis, @gamer00, @gothyjoshy, @gungunkrishu, @harmonyval, @hors, @insaneworks, @javiersebastian, @jayna, @jokinmenipieleen, @joshman, @joshmania, @katamori, @kipswolfe, @korinkrafting, @lextenebris, @lightsplasher, @loreshapergames, @luigi-tecnologo, @melinda010100, @mermaidvampire, @modernzorker, @movement19, @musicapoetica, @nickyhavey, @nikema, @pandasquad, @papabyte, @pataty69, @phgnomo, @pjmisa, @prospector, @qwoyn, @r00sj3, @raserrano, @remlaps, @remlaps1, @rhom82, @roleerob, @runridefly, @saboin, @scientes, @semasping, @sgt-dan, @shookriya, @simplymike, @smcaterpillar, @sodom, @sorin.cristescu, @soyrosa, @terry93d, @the-bitcoin-dood, @tittsandass, @tommyl33, @tvulgaris, @webgrrrl, @wholeself-in, @yougotavote!

Click on one of the following links to delegate 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, or even 5000 Steem Power. Thank You!

Cheers,

TrufflePig