Are Curation Rewards The Real Problem?
A topic that comes up often is how many votes some content receives. The topic comes up regarding "over-valued" posts. The primary reason for curation rewards in the beginning, was to reward people for finding good content. (Reading) Currently, curation in large part a bot's game. What if we considered curation rewards only when a vote + a view are present?
Okay, Okay - I knew you would hate the idea, I posted it for discussion.
However, I wonder how the voting would change if people were voting for content and not curation rewards.
Edit: Right now we don't know if a vote means, I like this content, or I am hoping for a reward, or my bot follows Bob's Bot. It would be nice to know.
I think that most of the "issues" relating to content/voting/rewards is due to the very low number of users. In my opinion, most of this stuff goes away as the user base expands. When we're talking about 25K, 50K, or 100+K active users, there's no way we could even see all of the posts in a given day. That's when our own little groups will emerge and we essentially just vote on content from them. There may be some trending page voting, but I can't imagine a lot of that will happen - and the SP rewards will likely be diminished per user.
Everyone is too caught up with what's happening right now and they want to make changes based on that. If there's no actual abuse, then we don't need to worry about it. Most of these "problems" are preference related and don't need to be addressed. Blind/Auto voting is a concern, but there's not much that can be done about it, other than not supporting the people running those apps and not supporting the bad (in our opinion) content that they upvote.
As @inertia pointed out - if there is a way to get around the code, then it will be done, as long as there is economic incentive to do so. We can play the cat-and-mouse game, but how far are people willing to go to prevent gaming? And what impact would that have on the platform if/when the economic incentive is eliminated?
My opinion is that we need to wait for this place to grow. If we can expand the active user base to ten times (or more) than what it is now, and also continue seeing stakes change hands and become more distributed, we'll see most of these issues resolved without having to make a bunch of new rules and implement a bunch of new code. For a place that is supposed to be decentralized, I'm seeing far too many calls for rules and coding changes to favor certain content...or to push it out entirely. It's ridiculous - and it's not good for adoption and investment from those who like the initial concept.
Come for the decentralized blockchain and censorship-resistant social media platform! Stay for the infighting and clamoring for more content-based rules!
^ That doesn't work.
sorry, this is empty sophistry. And hypocritical, bought and paid for sophistry at that. Where do you think those 100K new users are going to come from? And what metric from steemits current engagement and retention stats is behind that prediction?
You can tell out content is going to be great because were going to get so many new users. And you can tell were going to get so many new users because our content is great.
Except reality simply doesn't bear that out. We have a problem with bad content, and though it isnt the only reason we have been struggling, its part of it. And it ends up never getting fixed, because many here believe that we can have growth without value or quality. It just aint going to happen.
Yep. Seems some people want to encourage the nonsense.
You make some excellent points regarding the low user-base. I look forward to the day there are enough users and we can have filtering to our tastes in content. Thank you for the thoughtful comment.
The solution to bad votes is more votes and better votes. The solution is not to silence the only things that are retaining our authors by doling out rewards and thereby preventing author demoralization. As a person, I can view and vote on a dozen pictures in the same time it takes me to read and vote on one article of moderate length. Some form of automation is needed to balance the scales.
Whatever algorithm a bot is using, it's a heuristic for post quality. Like all heuristics, some are better than others. In the end, the algorithms that win will be the ones that make people happy. That means: generating rewards, raising the value of steem power, and attracting readers by raising the visibility of high quality posts. In the end, it's better to have bots voting and maybe getting some wrong than to have high quality posts go totally ignored because they never happen to get in front of human eyes. Especially when longer posts that might take 15 minutes or more to read are competing against pictures that can be viewed in moments.
I elaborate on these points here and here.
Thank you for your well thought out response. I will take a look at your posts.
Yup, I mentioned that to senseiteekay yesterday.
Modify the requirement that you need a media screen present. Bots don't have media screens. Problem solved there. That means a monitor needs to be present, that means someone with an actual computer. Maybe this can be bypassed I don't know, but it's a start!
The voting would change for the better, with more responsibly valued voting to judge content. Maybe all this laziness is what needed to happen to plunge things into chaos and teach people the valuable lesson of the importance of quality in life ;)
When the blind upvote blindly, you get a blind everything, with nothing being valued that way, only a few people who curate and the rest auotupvote a trail, or autovote bots of the same people. Some people will never upvote me because other people they "trust" blindly to curate for them in trails or whatever don't like me, so they will never get any curation rewards from my content, because of this blindness issue.
There is a level of responsibility with our votes not being recognized.
Oh, and how would the value of Steem change if people did that? A LOT! Why? People would see that a community is actually valuing content themselves based on some measures of quality, rather than just focusing on money curation where people don't even judge what gets rewarded themselves... who the fuck would want to invest in a robot land? BAHahaha!
This needs to be tried out. Bots are a big problem on this platform.
One other idea I had was if someone does click into an article the article unfolds upon a user being present in some form ( so it would say view more ) and thus unravel the article upon a click. Only till this happens a upvote can count ?
There's no way to enforce a screen requirement. All the blockchain knows is what the user tells them--it'd be trivial to lie. Or even if there was some scheme to do so the bot could create a hundred instances of itself running in docker, each of which thinks it is connected to a real monitor (but is actually just purely virtual.)
Yup true, forgot about the blockchain LOL, not a regular DB. NO one has to even use steemit to do anything... sigh..
Sounds like it would be difficult.
It would be an interesting experiment. I agree, it would reward different and more content and perhaps better content. Right now we don't know if a vote means, I like this content, or I am hoping for a reward, or my bot follows Bob's Bot. It would be nice to know.
Steemsports solved IT, will @fyrstikken's AnonOphraBot survive? ;) <3
Women on STeem
This post has been ranked within the top 80 most undervalued posts in the second half of Dec 27. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $5.02 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Dec 27 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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Hi @whatup
I agree with your sentiment!!