Curation Trails, bad or good for the platform?
I've been having some mixed conversations about Curation Trails lately. For those of you unfamiliar with this:
The website www.Streemian.com created by @xeroc provides users with the possibility of following other users votes with your account. That means whatever they vote on, you will vote shortly after on it as well.
[Image from Streemian.com]
This raises some flags in some users minds:
-it feels automated
-gives false active user statistics
-many might not vote on the post after seeing it already having received many votes, although value is still low
My thoughts about it
Like many decentralized innovations lately, there are both ways to abuse/misuse the nature of it and anonymity gives certain foul players a layer of safety to do so. But most of the time, the pros will outweigh the cons and people won't mind the small % of bad apples compared to the bigger picture.
To demonstrate the pros of voting trails, I'll just write down a list of all things that come to mind and you the reader can decide if the pros outweigh the cons in this matter.
Pros with voting trails
Active and trusted voters of the community, independent of the amount of SP they control have a bigger role in voting forward content and filtering it out from the less quality posts
Quality is often subjective, but there are a variety of Trails you can join such as @robinhoodwhale or @curie, you choose the voter you like, and if after some time you don't feel your votes are used fairly or the way you want to, you can change Trails any time.
Users who are very busy or other work aren't often able to actively vote on the platform, doesn't mean they don't believe in the platform and don't want it to succeed. They can instead join a Trail and let other users in the community vote more often and provide a general balance in the rewards of contributing users.
Thus creating a win-win situation, the authors and content-creators less often have their contributions missed/filtered out in the spam/invisible from other users while the investors still actively voting on them and keeping the ecosystem of Steem and SteemDollar flowing. You could also say its a win-win-win with the last one being the platform and its future.
Some examples
Let's say I have 500k SP after my votes. I notice a new user A has made an introduction post 2 hours ago, it has gotten 3 votes and is valued at 0.01$. The intro post had a lot of effort put into it, seemed genuine and got missed by many readers early. Knowing the amount of weight my votes have, I would give this post ~10% vote with the intent of user A's post getting some sort of visibility if you scroll down "Hot" list or just the "New" list and see it has gotten some value and raises some interest to the other readers. Some readers may also enjoy it and then Connections/Follows occur naturally, giving the author a small reward so they can verify this isn't "fake" money, and giving them an opportunity to connect to other users and easier access information about getting started as a content provider.
Voting trails take un-used Voting Power, turns it into a win-win situation for both parties, but also gives me a bigger incentive to curate better and improve the quality of the platform with others feedbacks through voting over time.
For instance, if I notice that some of my votes have not received many votes after it, you start to notice patterns over time and with the community slowly move into a "better quality" content agreement. This is something that happens naturally and is relevant to "Survival of the Fittest"
As a former really active Redditor I am a prime example of moving to social platforms that provide a better quality. From Facebook/Instagram to Youtube then to Reddit and now to one which I personally believe will incentivize content to become greater than we could have imagined before. While giving the creators 100% of the value they deserve and dividing it among any trend/tag or interest that appeal to the majority.
Hope to hear some of your thoughts on voting trails, if you feel like joining one I still have invite keys left to give to Streemian.com, feel free to DM me on steem.chat for more information.
I'd add that:
I agree! and especially this one:
I'm generally pro-automation on this platform, but it can go wrong. Here's the scenario I've been toying with: say I build an epic greedy machine-learning bot that only chases curation rewards, and doesn't check posts for quality at all (hint: in the next few weeks, I may or may not deploy version 0.1 of this bot). This bot catches people's attention, and it starts attracting a following on Streemian of people who want curation rewards. After about a month, it has the reputation of being the most lucrative bot out there, and has several million SP following it.
Now, once I've established my bot with its followers, I can turn off my machine learning algorithm and start having my bot vote for whatever posts I want it to, because I know that whatever I vote for will go to Trending. Is this a good situation? It's basically given me the power to influence the face of the site. Of course, it all depends on my ability to get the bot working in the first place...
If people feel that power is misused and you shouldn't be able to influence it the way you are doing, then they will leave your trail and downvote the posts you have voted on outside of the promise you made it would be used in from the beginning.
Sure, some would. But if I had enough followers, I'd still be making good on my promise of making people money, so anybody who's following me for the curation rewards would stay. It would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Who knows if this is actually possible, but it's something to watch out for. It makes me want to pay closer attention to Streemian.
I think it just does what we were trying to get away from in the first place.... the same few authors getting all of the votes. Now if you attach your wagon to someone who is actively voting for new members a la @curie, that is a different story but in general that is where I think it would go...
Yes, that is the plan. I wrote a post announcing my voting trail and have been experimenting with it lately since Streemian has been down. But its all going to be teamworked with @projectnewbie which is also a project of mine and we are becoming bigger day by day! :)
That sounds like a great idea! Thank you for doing that. If we don't build up the new guys and keep them coming here the site will never last...
The main point for me is that it allows one to earn curation rewards when away from the computer. I would love a feature that allowed you to "invest in people" on Steemit in a more passive/automated away.
Indeed or sort of what patreon.com does except that you do it here through votes!
Trails will be a thing of the past with re-steem. Why follow a vote when you know (or trust) that someone will vote after you?
(re-steemed for effect)
Hmm, re-steemed will surely help yes, but this is also something for those who really don't have the time to be too active here themselves, and instead let 100% of their voting power just sit there (like @dantheman mentioned in one of his posts and the reason to wanting to change the whole voting in the last patch, was because of these users who are idle and not contributing to the network, but still have a big share in it)
Oh and thanks for the resteem. :)
I have automated voting as well from the robinhood whales and all am looking for is to point my votes in the direction that is best for the community. So whatever happens from here I'm ok with because you all are backing it! Thanks @steemit
I will probably be following curie or rwh during the hours I sleep, to keep the rest manual.
There is nothing too evil about it. One could consider it an alternative to delegated voting which many of us (myself included) have suggested it from quite early on.
Thanks for sharing this again... Sounds like a really good ideaa..
I'm in :)
thank you very much excellent information
One thing is for sure.. There is a high level of trust demanded for trailing a curator. I have run into issues trailing curators who have a different sensibility than myself. They have voted for things that I simply wouldn't vote for because I think that they are harmful to the platform, regardless of the likelihood of rewards.
For example, a curator who is looking to maximize his return might vote for whalebotted authors who devote the majority of their posts to "featuring" other authors. I personally think that this a practice which degrades the platform in most cases, because the most prominent and prolific of these tend to dedicate most of their efforts to bootstrapping friends and family with little regard for the quality of the content.
If I knew that somebody basically shared my own sensibilities, I'd have very little hesitation in following them.
I agree completely! here is a relevant comment I wrote regarding the "featuring new author" stuff, it's gotta stop now with resteem.
the good thing with blockchain and trust is that sooner or later if it is abused someone will notice it, with more users the chances increase and over time filter out the untrusted users with the ones who really want to improve the content and future of the project.
Maybe we should start voting for those Curators like we do for witnesses?
I think you vote on them by following them :)