OCD's stance on cross-posting and news about empowering niche communities
Hey everyone!
Wow, what a week, eh? Many have been asking me why I haven't been posting much lately and wondering if it's due to the tron/witness things or the retaliatory downvotes. It's mainly been my witness duties taking a lot of time and curation taking the rest, I don't want to discuss the witness stuff much in this post though as it's being talked a lot already on chain, discord dms and slacks. My DM is always open if you have questions about it or want to discuss it, I just want to mention how proud I am of the witnesses doing the right thing and everyone who's understood this difficult decision they had to make for the security of Steem.
I am really glad about the new feature implemented by Steempeak that allows you to cross-post as it has allowed me to share some great posts from users on the chain into the right communities and with that using the autovotes on my account instead of them going to waste (if there are autovoters that rely on me to not keep their vp at 100%). With every new feature comes a big spectrum of usage and misuse so let's dive into what we at OCD think about cross-posting and how we will proceed to allow it's usage onto our community.
Before we get to that I just wanted to share a screenshot from 3 weeks ago of our community stats at the time and how much it has grown since:
Now:
Over 900 new subscribers since 3 weeks ago and over double the amount since communities were rolled out, amazing, thanks to everyone being part of it and sharing your content through us!
Cross-posting
To keep it simple, we will only accept cross-posts from users who share the works of others into our community. Yes we know this can be abused with alt accounts, etc, but as curators who are active here daily and have been so for a very long time let's just say we know and witness a lot about the userbase. We also check each cross-post to see how much the original has earned, if one of our votes has already landed on it, if the author is "abusing" his autovotes to cross-post everywhere or has friends doing it for him. We will be very selective with curating cross-posts and after warning users a set amount of times we will have to mute them which will result in no curation/visibility on our community.
Cross-posting older posts is still a bit of a gray area but there too we will check what the past rewards were and that none of our accounts already rewarded the post. We'd prefer this to be used mainly for relevant/timeless posts and mainly if they were really missed out from curation.
So TL;DR:
- don't self cross-post
- don't spam/abuse your autovotes
- don't "vote-trade" cross-post (similar rules to general vote-trading apply if you are mainly only cross-posting the same authors constantly - if you do this a lot you run the risk of being mistaken for an alt account of the author you often cross-post )
- be rational
If you think you have been muted unfairly from our community, you can always join our Discord server and let us know why you think that is the case.
Empowering niche communities
From Monday forward we will be doing a big change to our compilation posts. As you know we have been nominating and curating posts from outside of our community in there and we will keep doing that, but now with a change of structure. The compilation post will now instead be split up in different communities and consist of nominated posts from each of them brought to us by their curators and admins. This will give the posts some extra rewards and visibility with the compilation posts being pinned daily at the top of our community.
Communities supported and collaborating with so far; Travelfeed & Steemitworldmap, OnChainArt, AlienArt and Lightpainters United
Other than that we are also actively curating the Steem Gaming Community and SteemDevs
If you are the owner of a niche community and could use a kickstart of curation, please get in touch with us through our Discord and we will discuss things further to assist you in growing it if we feel it is an important and unique one. Thanks!
Thanks for reading, feel free to let us know about our stance on cross-posting and if you think there's something we've left out. We are open to changes and the current rules may change over time.
We will be sending out a one-time memo to every content creator who used to be in our old whitelist / someone @ocdb follows to let them know about our community and the focused curation going on here now instead. We hope you don't mind the memo as it's something we usually find frowned upon and don't do but we still see so many content creators using the #ocd, #ocd-resteem and #oc (this one may not be related to us of course) tags instead of posting through our community.
Another idea that came to mind, considering the popularity of "showcase Sunday" which as I've understood is reposting old "classics" (correct me if I'm wrong) could be to have a focused cross-posting day of old posts but from other authors than yourself (Sunday in this case). Many subreddits do this where they have specific days for specific posts. Let me know your thoughts on that.
(Voting this up for visibility)
Kind of. You are supposed to improve them. Some who write stories for instance might include all ten chapters in a single post and make some light edits.
I myself use it to expand out my main index of content which struggles with being near max character count. I than use that time as well to make updates to my main and sub-indexes.
I really like that idea as I've read some really good posts over time that were not noticed; sure this could encourage some people to get active again! I hate the idea of dead posts that really are deserving of being seen and getting their just rewards!
Maybe people could submit/nominate links in a post to be voted on and cross-posted as a reward? So like nominate weekend, vote weekdays, crosspost next weekend
I like that idea because whilst some people do improve/edit them it has become a bit of a post my old shit for mo' money affair :0)
Welcome to Steem :)
He's new here.
Thanks for clarifying this. It was quite unclear what was a reasonable use of cross posts, especially given the fact that auto-voters will double vote the post.
This is a restrained policy compared to others. It stops the worst circlejerking and should at least help to get abusers out of the woodworks.
I'm only
double-dippingcross-posting into my obscure communities using alts I made. I won't upvote these myself and I hope they don't get large upvotes.I wish steem just allowed one to resteem into different communities. Hopefully this crpss-posting is a temporary measure. Also, I wish enablers like steempeak would have them created with rewards declined or set 100% to null.
The accounts this feature mostly appeals to are the same people who thought 10 tags wasn't enough and 20 tags of actifit were just okay.
Fully agree with that:
and that:
As much as I really like all the @Steempeak features and they are really doing a great job there, this one screams vote farming and spam.
What difference it makes if I go and copy my post from yesterday and post it again today in different community (besides that I will be reported and downvoted for it), or use @Steempeak to do it for me?
My suggestions would be to deny all the rewards (as mentioned above) on cross-posts and leave link to original post if someone likes it, they can vote on that.
Maybe limit the cross-post to few, or just one per week. That would make the cross-posting very selective.
Or if its possible to actually cross-post the original post to a new community without creating another post with the same content.
I see on my feed the same posts multiple times sometimes. All with upvotes....
Yup. This is bid-bots 2.0 - content recycling via cross-posting.
How do you think outsiders are going to view this? As a positive development? Or more BS like self-voting, vote trading and vote-buying/selling.
Hey, guess what? Steem didn't think that was enough so now they enable a feature to copy and paste another's post and get rewarded with a 5~10% cut depending if the person who does it owns the community or not...the best part, no consent required.
To the outsider that have never been or seen Steem before it might seem normal. That's how the place works, so be it.
But considering that for the past years copy-pasta was punished, recycling own posts and posting them again was punished as well, I just don't understand how cross-posting in current form is allowed. It allows you to use the same content and monetize it again. Even if I would not be allowed to cross-post mine, I can monetize someone else content for the second or third time. And even earn on it!
Wild thought...
Imagine 10-15 people creating few communities, posting once a day and crossing all each other posts on daily basis. I know this might be easy to spot and downvoted, but just imagine :D
Steem or Steempeak? I though on Steempeak has the button. That's why posts do show normally there and on Steemit and Busy feed it looks like link spam.
Steempeak has it.
I just think they are making quite the statement by enabling it after so long. I am actually tempted to remove my support from their proposal, but I will give them a few weeks to see how it goes.
About your community thought, I could totally see a crosspost circle vote community starting up. They would be able to get away with less effort on their low effort posts. Hopefully tools are made to detect this so others can react.
hasn't been used that way as of yet and we believe for many reasons it will be avoided by smart farmers because it's too high profile and too easy to find them. They have too many other methods to hide their farming. But if you see cases bring them to the attention to people
What people will do first is post their full post to multiple communities... they'll do that way before using cross-posting.
How is that possible? As far as I know we are only allowed to use one community tag as the first tag.
That would actually solve the problem of publishing the same content (cross-posting) multiple times.
Just copy paste the whole post and post it again to a new community. Cross-posts are more visual than that other method.
You are suggesting to post the same content multiple times? :)
If I remember correctly up until now all the copy pasted posts (copies of older posts, or posted few times) were considered abuse and reported. Those accounts were then downvoted and put in blacklists for spam/reward abuse.
And yet we haven't seen vote farming abuse... people can see them all here #cross-post. We would be happy to see any statistical analysis.
hasn't been used that way as of yet and we believe for many reasons it will be avoided by smart farmers because it's too high profile and too easy to find them. They have too many other methods to hide their farming. But if you see cases bring them to the attention to people
What people will do first is post their full post to multiple communities... they'll do that way before using cross-posting.
I also haven't noticed much abuse yet. I guess people know better as you thought they would.
Can you imagine what communities would look like, say with 20k subscribers and anyone allowed to resteem their stuff onto it, though? Cross-posting is a bit more serious than just a resteem as it can affect your reputation and other consequences if abused. It's all still experimental and fresh out of the oven of course, we're trying to make the best use for it to also empower users to become good curators that crosspost onto the right communities. I'm surprised no one has created a bot that notifies the original creator if posts have been cross-posted but I'm assuming Steempeak will add that as a feature at some point similar to how they let you know when someone resteems your post above the post.
Anyway, the no self cross-posting will mitigate a lot of abuse we think, let's see how others use this tool and if the pros outweigh the cons. Early usage of new features/possibilities most often is negative in this technology.
Just when I was thinking of cross-posting into OCD a guide I made a long time ago for the new users ;)
Are these rules for curation only or are they also for moderation? Because I don't mind if I don't get curated as long as I get to share my guide.
If the guide is still relevant then why not, but maybe ask someone else to cross-post it for you instead. :)
Good question though, I think for curation mainly but if it gets spammy we might have to use the mute future.
BTW, I have a semi-urgent request.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the third post on the front page is by an anti-vaxxer promoting that idea. I made a comment where I copied and pasted a bunch of data I curated that partially contradicts that narrative.
I think it's dangerous to leave the data on its own, unchallenged, so if you could check out my comment, and if you agree with what I've said, I would appreciate if you voted around 0.1 STU to take it to the top, above the other anti-vaxxers in their echo-chamber.
I would do it myself but my vote is worth only half of what's necessary.
I shared it further, maybe someone with the time can read it through properly and curate. :)
I actually just got a biggish curation vote from a likeminded person, so I don't think this will be necessary unless a little whale passes by and upvotes some more antivaxx in the comments section.
Thanks, though! Let's hope my comments help people find proper education instead of relying on myths and populism!
Lol. 💉=☠
There would be a lot of resteeming. Perhaps it could be set to subject to mod approval if necessary based on posts or accounts. It could also be limited the same as cross-posting. You are right though as it does seem more serious and would require more community effort.
One can search for beneficiaries, but not on Steempeak. I bet that will change in their next update. If I find losers are re-posting my stuff I'll downvote it.
Sounds a bit harsh. xD
You will then have no choice but love my new spam bot that cross-posts acidyo posts with a delightful message =)
The account acidyocrosspost appears to be free.
I think ginabot notifies you. Also, of I'm remembering right steampeak does tell you when someone cross posts your post in their notification, or activity, section... I can't remember off the top of my head what it's called.
I could be wrong about steempeak though, it was 5 days ago when I last cross posted content and my memory is crap 😂
Oh and about the @null and @steem.dao option, I agree. Some times visibility is worth more than the rewards and if some crossposters feel the original post already earned a good amount but sharing it to the right community is important having the option to set the 90% or even the 5% they get to steem.dao or null would be important, or be able to adjust how much of the rewards go there.
Maybe the crosspost feature can be enhanced. It would be easy to make a similar feature but setting beneficiaries to @null and/or @steem.dao
I like visibility, but I would prefer a link to my post and a short summary. Taking away 10% (5community 5 crossposter) without any consent for clicking a button feels wrong.
However, I guess there is so much crap being posted, finding a post and clicking cross-post would easily be 10% of the work that goes into a typical post for a lot of posters (won't name them, but I'm sure you have an idea) especially if they gasp add an entire sentence.
Remember that posts lose votability after 7 days. So unless that changes, resteeming into communities would lose authors the renewed votability of their old posts.
The alternative is to lengthen the votability to infinity and allow various payout cycles. But I'm not very sure if this is even viable.
You can also just copy and paste and post again. Cross-posting legitimizes double-dipping. It would be best to actually improve the post to get more rewards during the double-dip.
Alternatively if you read an old post and like it, you can upvote a more recent post or the authors reply to a comment on the post. Actually, the possiblities are endless and better than spamming cross-posts everywhere.
Yeah. I'm aware of all of this, but it's very problematic :( The community is original-content-centred and this disincentivises most kinds of reposts and shares that are not inline links (like this), explicit links, resteems or reblog.
Copying and pasting is basically like summoning the devil. I think it's due to the difference between the people in this community and the people on Reddit and similar places. The demographics are simply very different. I think the average age on Steem is much, much higher than on Reddit, by at least a decade and a half. This creates a more traditional-media conception of social media that creates a very unfamiliar world for us Internet-raised younglings.
!ENGAGE 25
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I think 30 tags. One for each witness vote.
:D
I've just started a new community and I'm trying to come to grips with the cross-posting thing. It's a landscape photography community and I've tried to kick it off with some good content to begin with so as to attract subscribers. I've cross-posted a couple of good posts from some better photographers, some being current posts and one old post (rewarded in the past). It feels a bit weird doing this, and particularly weird given I make 10% on those cross-posts. My intention certainly isn't to make money, but to just get things going initially. Although, I do like the idea of "curating" good content by cross-posting it into the community. Could be a great way to give exposure to some new or under-appreciated content producers.
Not really a fan of the current cross posting feature in it's current state. I wish it all pulled from the same post. Instead you now have a bunch of copies with separate views, comments, and votes. Kind of odd so I tend to ignore them.
Yeah that's why I'd want it to give more attention to the original creator. Then again if they didn't know about the community it's only a gain for them and for the community. Definitely needs some more work and features to improve it though.
Good point. The author has no oppertunity to explain themselves or prohibit their content from being used like this. If someone cross posts my stuff, without my explicit permission and I find it, I will downvote.
I created a new account the other day to cross-post posts into communities but i'm yet to have time to use it. Was thinking it would it would be an idea for community curators to share a cross-posting account too. And then I was pinged this: https://steempeak.com/hive-120078/@lotusshares/in-support-of-evergreen-rewards-and-clean-green-health-living
Obviously there are few autos on these accounts but at least the post will arrive in the relevant community and could quickly (or not) earn the trust of curators wanting to boost this authors shared post.
I'm personally against a designated account to cross-post with, it would go against empowering cross-posts and rewarding "curators" that use them well. It would also add more weight to the legitimacy of the cross-posts if they do it on their main accounts as they wouldn't want to cross-post garbage/jeopardize their reputation.
Fair enough. Probably room for both approaches and no doubt there will be scammers trying whatever they can.
I cross posted something last night to a writing community. It was my first time and I totally didn't realise about the auto votes (DOH) but it ended up being quite nice for the author because he got nada on his original which was nice. Definitely something I will use in future, but sparingly!
I'm still trying to understand this crossposting feature. One could crosspost another author's old article in a particular community?
Does the author get more rewards if that post had already been rewarded in the past?
Would you, th crossposter, get any incentive for crossposting?
What happens if i crosspost an old post of mine?
What happens if i crosspost a new post of mine?
What are the restrictions?
It took me a while to get my head round it but basically:
You can cross post an article to a community old or new
It can be an article by another author or one that you have authored
What it does is create a post under your name in that community with the articles contents displayed within. In steempeak it displays like a normal post in other front ends it looks like a link.
The beneficiaries are set to 90% original author 5% to the cross poster and 5% to the community. So the cross poster benefits slightly but the original author gets most of it.
So it is helpful to the author.
There are no real restrictions but it is posted under your (the cross posters name) so there could be repercussions if you cross post your own stuff. It could get downvoted for being spammy or reward farmy. Or if you have autovotes they may remove you for posting too much.
Also a community might mute you if you cross post too much or your own stuff.
So while there are no real restrictions the community as a whole will act if they see what looks like abuse.
That help?
Thanks, man, this helped a lot.
Totally get it now. I think cross-posting is an amazing new way to curate.
If an influential curator finds an extra post he'd love to reward but is worried he's used up too much SP for the day, he could crosspost it for others like him to find. That way, he helped the original author gain recognition for his work.
Since it's going to show in the crossposter's name, it would help if there was a tag to let people know he's crossposting.
flagged for cross-posting abuse and double-standarts
The art of standing is truly phenomenal.
Hmmm how has he abused it or had any double standards?
https://steemit.com/steempeak/@kingscrown/steempeak-new-function-watch-out-and-communities ive explained here why its wrong to use in on main acc + when i wasnt aware of it he flagged me. hes 100% aware how it works.
Like I mentioned I posted the previous post in the wrong community so I couldn't pin it to the OCD community, hence the repost and will be burning the rewards of the previous one. Not surprised you're being petty, though.
He's just butthurt he gets downvoted. Recent downvotes were on 3speak videos of a "6 sec ad" and an old bitcoin chart video that didn't belong to him. Then he deleted those videos and the default video by @wehmoen showed up instead which he pretended was his to accuse me of wrongfully downvoting it. It's kind of funny really.
One thing I donot understand is why we are not allowed to cross post own content. A post may be relevant to many communities and not being allowed to cross post on our own might affect the scope of the posts.