RE: Steem Improvement: A GENEROSITY Rank Algorithm - A Method of Increasing Post Quality That Promotes A Reduction of Rewards Pool Exploitation.
Brilliant concept! I would also like to add my two cents:
Self upvoting IS a huge problem, contrary to @lextenebris - once an intelligent newcomer to the steem platform does some digging they see two things immediately wrong with the system.
Those are 1 - self upvoting and 2 - upvote bots.
The people with a bit more logic and sleuth skills then will quickly find out the third thing wrong with the system - sock puppet accounts.
I think this concept is absolutely brilliant and will be discussing it in my vlog tomorrow, however I would like to suggest two idea that I dont see here.
1 - Interaction with upvote bots decreases a generosity rating.
and
2 - Continued voting to a certain account decreases generosity rating. As in: The first X number of votes made to another account per week ADD to the generosity rating, any votes above X number SUBTRACT from the generosity rating.
To explain:
1: I see the use of upvote bots as the SINGLE most dangerous thing for the steem platform. What is preventing a future of steem where anyone that wants ANY type of exposure has to pay for it.. do we seriously believe that a new user from the States will shell out $10-50 (maybe in the future $100-500) to promote some blog on a platform he is not even familiar with, let alone someone from the third world. If we want steem to succeed the bots SOMEHOW must be kept in check. A simple solution is to lower a generosity rank for interacting with upvote bots.
2: Sock puppet accounts: many users are already gaming the system with multiple accounts, and already have little need to self upvote. For the ones that still are self upvoting, after this generosity rank comes into play, they will simply adjust their voting practices slightly. So it may seem that a whale is SO generous merely by upvoting their alternate accounts. A simple solution is to limit the generosity concept from voting on a single account over and over.
Also this WILL encourage people to find new and interesting content, and there is certainly not going to be any shortage of it in any particular field of interest as soon steem will have 1 million users. And if we can keep this entire platform from becoming a giant robot fueled circle jerk - hopefully many many more.
Thank you for this novel idea that I hope will spur the minds of many on this platform.
Thanks for your comments!
There's a lot to think about here. It would certainly be possible to include votes for self via a bot as a self upvote, just as any other self upvote, that's a good point. Part of the confusion here is that the official terms for Steemit actually say that using bots is prohibited (although this rule obviously isn't enforced) - so adding a metric that considers bots would be a sure sign they need to update the terms too. That said though, I don't see how this can be fully effective, since it is not fair to reduce the rank of a profile just because it receives votes from bot accounts, since bots can be paid by people to vote for others without the account owners knowledge or agreement. This therefore means that account owners will always be able to vote for themselves via bots, using sockpuppet accounts. I don't see a way around this that is fair.. Unless the metric for bot votes is a completely separate one that does not have any effect on the 'generosity' metric.
If I have understood your 2nd point correctly here - the algorithm I have proposed actually already takes your point into consideration, since gaining a high generosity rank will not be possible without upvoting a range of other accounts (relative to the most generous account).