Bots and Manual Curation idea
There is a lot of talk about the pros and cons of manual vs bot curation and plenty of posts that go in depth into this so I won't. There have been various ideas floating around about how to deal with various aspects of the problems and some have been quite complicated.
Previously, curation returns were 50/50 with the poster but with automated voting bots this seems quite high for many authors. What I was thinking is about having a relatively simple approach to the problem and killing a few birds with one stone by rewarding manually curated content.
There has been some talk of introducing captcha but this is circumvented by bots as they vote directly on the chain, not through the front-end. But the idea has some merit.
What if the votes that interact directly with the blockchain (bots) received a lower reward than those that solve a captcha?
For example, a voting bot may get 10% curation return being a 10/90 split with the author but, using the capture, the curator can get a 40% curation, a 40/60 split. This way, there is a much higher incentive for manual curation and bot votes provide the author with more income.
The numbers are arbitrary and would have to be decided upon by witnesses for a Hardfork but incentivising manual curation while disincentivising auto curation will encourage much more willingness to engage.
The Captcha need not be too complicated as the bots roaming Steemit are not so intelligent, a simple button click like above will do. As they evolve, either harder captchas or another solution may be needed. The annoyance of a capture is more than made up for by the increase in curation returns.
Doing this would return favour for curators to actually find good content instead of safely upvoting the people they have always upvoted automatically. It will also reward the manual guilds for doing their jobs well and perhaps bring higher rewards to a whole range of authors who are currently missed as there is not a lot of willingness to sort through the trash for discovery.
Hopefully, this can at least be considered by some of the large investors and developers to see if it has merit.
Taraz
[ an Original for Utopian.io ]
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
Nice idea, but this is not possible. Steem is a decentralised blockchain, and it doesn't matter or discriminate how the vote was made.
Hypothetically, the blockchain could be modified so only votes from select frontends are authenticated and registered, or as you say, worth more. However, that would effectively make Steem a centralised ecosystem, so that's not going to happen either.
So if a hypothetical virus somehow infected all witnesses and funnelled all pool resources to my account, it would be allowed to run rampant to protect the ideology of being non-discriminating even though it will effectively kill the platform?
I have had less than two hours sleep... this might not make sense :)
That's an extreme situation. For something extreme, I'm sure the witnesses will do an emergency hardfork. There has been one emergency hardfork in the past, in fact, when Steemit.com got hacked very early on.
However, for everything but the most extreme, existential threats to the Steem blockchain, it's the wild west :)
I personally prefer a centralised, curated experience too; but that's not how Steem is.
So some smart ass eventually and effectively does the same with a decent AI and the same thing happens.
I question where the lines between decentralised freedom, community health and platform survival lays.
Having the ability to hf in an emergency already is an avenue prone to discrimination and colluded self-interest.
I do understand and am aware of your point though but seeing posts get autovoted for hundreds that say "BTC is 9000!" Is not going to sit well with users for long. Freedom of choice may eventually leave only the bots to wander the Steemchain halls.
2 hours sleep.... :D
The blockchain means absolute freedom. There will be rules designed to minimise abuse, but beyond that, absolutely anything goes. If someone's abusing some loophole, close that in a hardfork. That's the general philosophy of the blockchain world.
Whether such a philosophy works for a social network, remains to be seen. So far, Steem has had some advantages - the money and censorship-resistance, but largely remains an inferior platform to Reddit. They can ban bots and trolls because it's centralised.
Historically, bot usage on Steem has been declining sharply. Around fifteen months ago, it was basically whales running bots, and nothing else. (Not an exaggeration)
Anyone still remember @wang? :D
Haha, indeed. @wang and @laonie, the two pest whale bots. Both powered down to nil now. Kinda feel sorry for @laonie - invested 400 BTC into Steem, sold for 20.
I somehow always thought @laoni was @liondani. Oh well in $ value he is almost back to where he started with the BTC if he held in it. Let's hope he didn't put it on Synereo after. :P
I guess the decline is due to the lack of bot designing skills from the less savvy average user.
Yes, it remains to be seen how a social platform can survive decentralisation considering the various human behaviours.
Nice discussion guys 👍 Add some choice parts of this to the FAQ
I'm aghast! 😱
yeah what liberosist said basically. i still think there is merit to the idea of having witnesses (or other "elected" accounts) doing basic moderation.
Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.
You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
Well, it's an idea, at least. That's more than most people have contributed to the solution.
Still, the community seems to be divided on whether bot voting is even a bad thing to begin with. Unless everyone agrees that it is a problem, nothing will get done to solve it.
So full of enthusiasm :)
Yes, there are pros and cons to bots but one thing seems to be consistent, manual curators find better content usually and it means that the heavily auto-voted providers don't become complacent and lazy.
@beanz had an idea that whales, and possibly dolphins, could employ manual curators and simply oversee them, cutting out the time consuming work of finding new stuff that is valuable or old steemians that bring something new.
Also im working out how to do promotion for those willing to pay a fee and trust me. Im thinking mostly through the various podcasts and radio shows connected to discord but idk. I seem to connect ppl that i believe will give the other something. So idk what thats called. Recruitment? Asset management?
It is called employment. I have written several posts on similar. Here is one from 2 months ago:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@tarazkp/steemit-idea-number-upvote-markers
Employment is what you call bring two people together who inspire each or has what the other needs?
One needs work performed, the other needs to get paid for the work they perform.
Hmm. Im tired n so cant reply intelligently. Lol. But i will ask. If you are posting all these great ideas ... when will we make it happen? How? Can captcga work on open source blockchain? Will whales care to employ minnows when bots mighg work better and faster at getting instate returns??? Etc and on
Captcha can be used on the BC as it is on the interface only and coding attaches it ti the chain.
If the bots are disincentivised enough, they will employ or curate manually.
Timeframe? That is up to management.
I got leas than 2 hours sleep myself, so short replies at the moment. :)
You are quite right. Bot voting is usually seen as a necessary evil for investors to get their ROI. Suggestions that this post gives are a starting point and they can be implemented only if this acceptability decreases.
No, no, no.
While I understand the idea and where it comes from, heck I even find the reasoning behind it acceptable, captchas are one of the worst possible UX solutions in existing.
Worse even is using reCaptcha which is a Google owned and operated service and each reCaptcha solved further improves the Borg's AI and deep learning. Don't feed the data leech any further. Any input made to the Borg can, and eventually will, be used against your own data.
It need not be captcha per se. With all the smart coders, a similar solution could be implemented relatively easily that is Steem owned and operated.
Rewards are “in consensus”, that is to say, they are calculated by the rules of the blockchain itself.
Anything owned and operated by a single party cannot be “in consensus” without centralizing the control of the funds on the blockchain. That, for obvious reasons, won’t happen.
Forgive my lack of technical knowledge but does this mean that there is no way to differentiate rewards between bots/human? Or does this mean that it requires a Hardfork?
I remember there being talk for a different pool for comment voting, couldn't the same done for bots where they have access to a greatly limited pool so the more bots, the lower the reward?
If only the big issues of the Internet were as simple to solve. There is a reason why reCaptcha became the default. Because in UX it is the least evil of all.
Yet, logging in to Bittrex takes me on average 20 seconds more than it should when I'm not using a first world VPN IP. Because the invisible reCaptcha is highly elusive. For most of the world it's two levels of 'click all the squares with...', or two words from blurry pictures.
All other captchas have long been broken by bots or constantly defeat users. The latter which reCaptcha also excelled at until some time around 2014/15 btw. Facebook's captcha also constantly beats users btw.
There are hundreds of startups who have tried, and failed, to come up with a solution which is not a burden on the user, and isn't defeated. reCaptcha is the least evil, except that it is Borg owned and operated, and milked.
If some smart coders have a solution better than reCaptcha, they shall message me and demo it to me and I will have them acquired by one of the behemoths and make them really, really rich. Triple digit millions rich.
Even the most rudimentary of solutions will defeat the current bots and this at least buys some time and likely as they evolve, so does the price of deployment. So perhaps it will at least make a higher cost of entry into the bot market for a lower return. Seems that not many of the smart people are coming up with any practical ideas at all so it us left to layman like myself to try.
Let me know how that worked for you.
Keep in mind though that not everybody is willing to pay those 2 seconds. Any user lost because of it is a fail. I hope the layman can solve a years old conundrum.
When you do, same as for smart devs, hit me up and I will make you a very rich man. No costs/fees involved. I love seeing success.
You will have to come up with something absolutely amazing, and square peg/round hole thing tho. Anything less than that has been done and dusted already.
Great idea, glad you posted it as you have many more eyes to see it and getting it seen is the key to change.
Would this manual change also mean that the curator who pushes the upvote button gets a larger % and all of those riding the coattails so to speak on a vote trail would get less?
There is a lot of money being stolen from the pool by vote following just as much as vote buying.
yes, the trails are bot votes, they do not view so would suffer the penalty. At the very least, it would make the auto curators change their styles. Disruption alone may bring new ideas to the fore.
Let's see if others think it is great. Those that benefit from bots may not think it wonderful but big manual curators like @blocktrades may love it.
I did not realize @blocktrades was. I guess that can be another reason he earned one of my witness votes.
This is something that's been suggested many times before. Unfortunately the way captchas work is you have a question and an answer. The answer has to be held by a central authority in order for the bot to not know it. And this is decentralised and a transparent blockchain.
I did play around with the idea of a decentralised captcha system with these posts.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
It seems the only way to beat bots is to make them less profitable than manual curation. The last hard-fork had 2 changes, one which empowered manual curators (lowering the vote limit from 40 to 10) and one which empowered the bots (the linear reward curve)
Truth (as far as we know), this is the most practical option.
Then is it possible to just reduce the CR of direct interactions with the chain and increase the ones that go through the UI? I am not a blockchain person but it seems relatively retarded if there is no way to be able to create a distinction between a bot and a human.
The problem is there's no way for the blockchain to recognise there was a captcha answered correctly on the user interface because it comes from a central authority that has to hide the answers to the captcha
what about a slider?
While I sort of understand some are to busy to participate in steem, and hence need to use a bot to vote, the down side the they are in fact EXTRACTING value from the system. They add nothing in regards to "contributing", time, effort or personal participation. Basically dumbing down a "social" concept to an automated AI thing.
The easiest & best solution IMHO is
1 person = 1 account
that way only a limited number of votes can be given on a particular day.
Whales become less "authoritarian" in their role and minnows will grow.
It also helps solves the downvote Non-PC / content policing subject material issues.
$0.02
I agree with the reasonable, technically knowledgeable folks who've already commented: it can't be done on the chain a while keeping it decentralized.
BUT I do have some ideas around this and I've been burning a lot of brainpower in the last months trying to figure it out. I think there in fact is a solution, but it has it's upsides and downsides. I'm not ready to reveal it but if any smart people want to contact me on Steemit.chat do help me figure it out I'd be much obliged.
I hope some do contact you mate as I think that there are solutions available without compromising the decentralised nature of the chain. This has been one of the most actively commented posts so far ;)
In a way, that should worry you and all of us. The sad truth is that there a large vocal caucus of users who would welcome increased restrictions on the chain in the service of various human-centric interests, who's supported methods I believe is misguided and I always argue against, even if their goals good in theory.
We should be suspicious of anyone who wants to take any inch of freedom away and ask until well answered: what is this in the service of? Is it justified?
Your concept reeks of the extremes of youth. Your mindset results in humans serving the greater AI overlord within not more than 50 years.
Sometimes common sense is a useful tool.
As a common sense suggestion - a Proof Of Stake system that was ninja mined by a lucky few, and is then subject to all the big whales running BOTS to maximize their share of future rewards pool, is NOT going to survive long term. It will turn into a whale circle jerk. And then slowly decline.
But that's just me and common sense.
I know that won't appeal to the purists who are their own decentralized autocrats and oligarths
I think you are on to something. Sooner or later bots will run steemit. Just since I started in August, they seem to have exploaded in numbers. Will the bots take over if something isn’t done. I don’t want to wait and see.
An excellent idea, sir!
If the 'non captcha' split was very - very low, it might actually act as disincentive to any further bot growth...
I wish I had faith in the powers that be - wanting to change the systems though...I'm afraid I don't, atm
Thank you, yes, it would be an interesting thing to at least try I think. I am not a blockchain or technical person but from my limited understanding, it should actually be very hard to implement or roll back or onto something else if necessary.
I wonder if there is a way for us to do something? (well not me -tech savvy as a retarded rock)
This is something I have been pondering for a while.
I'll just write this out, so might not be too coherant, but hopefully give you the jist of an idea, and let you run with it....
I have a relatively small group of people I regulary interact with, on here.
People that have, imo, something of value.
If I am like this, I'm sure there are many like minded individuals also.
Sub groups/page on steemit, with a captchca code to be allowed to enter, post, vote, or comment.
I could think of, right now, 10/15 people I would be happy to have in the group. - (multiply each user with 10 of there preferred contacts, and you have a group of...a lot.)
All posting authentic content, all real people.
Joining the group/page by invitation. (and approval from, say 5, other members)
Sorry its all a bit vague, just wanted to get it out there...
I think communities will bring some of this in (it is all very vague) but the issue is that a group of heavily invested users create a secret circle jerk of sorts.
It is 530 am here and I havent slept in 20 hours so vague makes sense to me.
alcohol has the same effect...lol