How to reward the effort and not the post - a proposal for real-life activity reward systems

Source: http://reidoda.com/cos-436.html

What started out as a couple of conversations on the current state of Steemit (and its most pressing issues) with various steemians and the need to find solutions has resulted in a concept I am interested in exploring further here with you.

Two topics that have been on everyone's mind since the flagging wars and also the constant debate about bots and their use on the platform are the concept of quality (i.e. in terms of posts) and a 'fair' reward system. As someone who is used to solving problems for a living (at one stage that was my LinkedIn job description) I can foresee problems with both trying to define quality and therefore a system (or algorithm) that is going to solve the problem.

Put simply, if you can define an algorithm, then you can certainly come up with another algorithm to trump it. This is why law makers are forever having to amend laws and regulations to catch up with people who act legally but immorally. Also, if you have a system involving a large number of people then the only way to manage it efficiently is to apply a strategy that is optimal for the largest number of people (or the most 'important/valuable' population). Therefore, previous attempts to remove spam, plagiarism and bad behaviour simply results in new strategies to overcome the detection algorithms or people creating new accounts and starting over.

I believe that the solution might actually come from creating a reward system that gives higher weighting to real-life activities rather than simply posting content online. If you think about it, we are mostly rewarding people for posting rather than the effort that comes from creating the content for the post. I wrote about applying the test of mutual exclusivity on problems like this and you can see that because posts without substances can be rewarded with large payouts while posts with very high quality can end up with no visibility, there is a disconnect between the quality of posts and the reward. Just as an aside, I think it does take effort to come up with ways of beating the system (and therefore there is value in the effort), but we should be encouraging people to put those skills to better use (i.e. the difference between white-hat and black-hat hackers).

So what is the connection between the quality of posts and the reward? I hope it is obvious that the quality of the posts comes from the minds of the people that create them, and the reward also comes from knowing that you have created something recognized by other people as being worthwhile. No algorithms or bots can replace this process that takes place in our brain (yet), so a system based on real-life activities and interactions means that at least for the moment it would be too difficult to come up with an algorithm to outsmart it (without a lot of effort). Just as another aside, if you study the history of spam email you'll see why we haven't been able to solve the problem yet.

If you have managed to follow my train of thoughts, here's my tentative proposal for a system that can be based around real-life interactions. I was very tempted to try and come up with something AR/VR based, but I realized that creating something like Pokemon Go for Steemit might have legal ramifications, so I have stuck with a simple proof-of-concept that we can test in theory (or in a smaller scale) and see if it is practical.

Firstly, we need to define the real-life interactions that we want to reward, and this is pretty easy because essentially we are looking at WHO, WHERE, WHEN and WHAT:

• WHO are the steemians that you interact with in real-life (we can identify people with their account names)
• WHERE are these interactions taking place (we have enough phones that can geotag and track our locations)
• WHEN and how frequently are these interactions (we can verify this between using timestamps)
• WHAT are the things that you are doing as part of these interactions (we can verify this using WHO+WHERE+WHEN associated with an artefact or post)

Secondly, how do we reward these interactions? This is the tricky part where we'll need help from the rest of the community, but I believe it should be based on a combination of how complex these interactions are. So for example an interaction involving two people will be weighted less than a group of five steemians (e.g. Steemfest versus local meetups). An event that is co-ordinated over a large geographical location or a number of different locations (e.g. a contest between different countries versus an activity for a local group), and also a regular weekly meeting versus an annual event should be rewarded for engaging people in real-life activities more regularly.

Finally, WHAT is the part that we have all been struggling with, and that comes back to being able to define what 'quality' means on Steemit. I don't intend to solve that problem (as I have already dealt with it in previous posts, but basically we should look at empathy, humility and curiosity as key metrics), but suffice to say if you can tick off the other boxes then I almost guarantee this is going to be something quite worthwhile doing. I mean, incredible things almost always happen when you put a bunch of Steemians at the same place at the same time right (e.g. Steemfest)?

So a post now can simply becomes a validation of the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN and WHAT for your activities, and so we can actually upvote based on all of these elements and give credit for the effort involved in all of these aspects rather than just the act of posting. In fact, if we create an upvote system in which payouts generated from the post takes into consideration how much real-life activity/interaction is incorporated, you can almost instantly remove all influence of voting bots because those upvotes don't include real-life interactions. You can also be rewarded as you participate in the interactions rather than waiting for someone to notice your post in their feed so they can upvote or resteem it.

In time, when we have developed the appropriate technology for integrating and embedding those real-life interactions into the blockchain and reward them based on how the community values each of those elements, we can stop spending time posting or comment and instead simply engage in interactions without worrying about whether our efforts will go unrewarded (or perhaps I am being too optimistic here?).

I have spoken to people such as @mattclarke and @lestatisticien as part of the process in coming up with this concept. I think this is about as fleshed out as I can get without having to write a proper utopian.io contribution on this (which is going to require some designers and developers to put in their two Steems worth). But I don't think we need a system for this at all - there's nothing stopping you from teaming up with another steemian to do something together, and we already do plenty of this (and need to do more of). While we are still only upvoting based on the activity of posting and not much else then this issue will continue to plague the system. But I hope that you can see the soution is not so far fetched and impossible to achieve - if it is a problem that we as a community actually want to do something about!