RE: Open Discussion: Fix Trending & Stop Promotion Abuse
How about we actually address the real problem: the blockchain protocols that created the current shit show?
HF17 (post reward penalty and 7-day payout), HF18 (delegation), and HF19 (linear rewards and 4x upvote) stripped away most of the mitigation/protections that were in place for identifying and dealing with spam and other abuse. Combined with a reduction in SP requirements for bandwidth, this place has gone full block-spamming with no accountability...and has actually made it lucrative.
Continually trying to treat what are symptoms of the disease rather than curing the disease itself is futile. If nobody wants to acknowledge or address the actual problems with the blockchain protocols that have created this mess, then there’s no point debating the useless “fixes” that people keep proposing.
We all know the problems. Very few people, if anyone at all, is identifying the source. I think maybe it’s time to stop kowtowing to STINC and the incompetent witnesses that do whatever STINC proposes. This blockchain and the culture here is currently f***ed. Don’t you think it’s time to reconsider its direction?
Korean pumps won’t last forever. At some point, people will need to grow a spine and actually DO something about the vast incompetence and ignorance of those in “leadership” roles who control the direction of Steem.
Linear rewards are fundamentally flawed. I pointed this out many times. Here's one. I'll possibly make a whole post about it.
I don't necessarily agree with everything else you said but I do agree with this.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/steemit-winter-update-2017-reflection-our-vision-statement-and-mission-and-a-look-forward#@teamsteem/re-steemitblog-steemit-winter-update-2017-reflection-our-vision-statement-and-mission-and-a-look-forward-20180221t053905349z
Linear rewards still aren't the root of the problem. It's like banning guns, to prevent crime. It doesn't matter much if you're killed with a knife instead of a gun.
The actual root of the problem is failing to incentivize societal virtues other than financial. Stake-weighting is the mechanism that subsumes all other societal virtues to financial holdings. This is the source of almost all societal ills, and not merely Steemit's trending page.
Jesus attacked the moneylenders for this reason.
It's still the reason.
I'd happily give my votes/attention to anyone who can help people see the world as I see it so that their content can reach a wider audience and gain more acceptance or resistance.
Under the current system, it seems the people who will end up with the most Steem will be those who create 10 posts with the help of a bot and upvote those 10 posts leaving everyone at a disadvantage.
The power of the people come from what people put their attention on. This is where the power/value of Steem stem from.
Hard to tell someone to let go of the easy money, they will lose their witness spot to the next guy willing to scam the pay to play setup.
LOL you crazy.. speaking things that make so much sense in a place where nonsense is the standard.
I agree, it's really important for humanity to start getting a blockchain social media right, it's even getting critical now.
I only recently joined, composed 2 posts that were not looked at by anybody, felt like a waste of energy. Wondering what i'm doing wrong and thinking about tipping a bot - how else will people even start to notice the contribution?
You have failed to realize that screaming into a void gains no attention. I've been here almost a year now, and for the most part 3/4 of my rewards come from comments, rather than my posts. I do post, but engaging in discussions is the actual point of social media, not content creation.
It isn't the quality of posts that most matters, but the quality of engagement. Making a post is akin to starting a conversation. Commenting is joining in. Usually the conversations I join are more profound than those I start ;)
Until you have a large following spending a lot of effort making posts isn't going to generate substantial financial rewards. Jumping on the bots doesn't produce useful engagement, and thus isn't much point, at least to me. I've never bothered, because I'm not here to make money, but to escape censorship and propaganda infesting other platforms.
If your only purpose here is to gain financial rewards, go mine some crypto instead of mining the rewards pool here intended to reward creators and incentivize Steemit society. Your question indicates otherwise, despite interest in rewards.
Seek out content that aligns with your interests and comment cogently when you have insight to offer, and you will grow a community that is interested in what you have to say. Then your posts will be seen by your followers, rather than no one. Except for appearing in new, which is chaos, only your followers see your posts in their feed--unless you pay for botvotes, which doesn't get you any attention from me, cuz I'd rather wander aimlessly through new than be annoyed by the panderers in trending.
Build an audience through participating in the community of interest and you will post to that audience. You haven't done that yet. You are now, by commenting here.
The words of wise man once said the above speech. I agree with all your advice. What is curious is that I make more money off photos. The money from comments and posts is on average the same!
Agreed. As a new user, I was able to spot this in a few weeks.
The fact that one user can throw a tantrum and downvotes my reputation from 40 to -5 proves that point. I am talking about #hgin if you haven't figured that out.
Unless these loopholes are fixed. There will be others like him and then the whole place will turn into a total spam fest.
@kabir88
I'd really love to witness that change @ats-david, but I guess if Steemit, Inc had any interest in fixing steemit.com they would've taken according actions. We're doing circles around the very same issues since months.
In that context I always remember those words from Ned during the 'blocktalk' two months ago (Source):
From that point on I stopped worrying about steemit.com because I realized that it's not a priority anymore. Yet I never fully understood their reasons. As you perfectly described, it's not a superficial issue but the consequence of a lacking governance.
The larger stakeholders would tell you now: Wait for Hivemind and SMTs. But then they don't tell you how long you need to wait...:-) Communities were announced in January 2017 and planned to be implemented in Q3/2017.
From my point of view, to abandon steemit.com and focussing on something completely new is as if someone wanted to fix a broken relationship by having a baby. How could an additional project built on the very same unstable ground, have a chance to succeed?
I've been powering down since November 2017 for the simple reason that I don't agree with how Steem is governed, and I never regret my decision. Since I only engage with my own community - both on the blockchain and on discord - I also sleep much better :-))
Now I perfectly understand your will to change something, I've been on the same track for months. But then there is a point of time when you realize that you're trying to fight against windmills...
Have you checked EOS.io already?
See you around 👊
@ats-david You havn't really explained what the disease is and why those forks created a problem.
You said that these protocol changes have stripped away spam protection, spam to me is also a symptom not the disease. Spam is the consequence of a system that penalize its users for moderating it which is what the steem blockchain does.
There needs to be some rewards for downvoting too, for example if a post has more negative weight than positive after 7 days then all the rewards on that post goes 100% to those who voted a negative and the author and those who upvoted get nothing. I don't know how hard and gameable it's going to be to build something like this but it is absolutely necessary for the community to police itself.
Regarding OP, the first question we have to ask is :
Is vote buying advertising or not? We have to come to consensus to what it actually is. If it's advertising then simple UI changes can solve most of it. On a side note I'm also surprised how all existing steem apps display the steem content in the same way which has proved to be one of the worst discoverability experience for users.
To answer the initial question, I see a lot of flaws in the vote buying model for it to be the way advertisers promote on steem in the future. To name a few: advertisement can be downvoted, buying limits ( model doesn't scale ). I could be wrong but in its current form I don't see it being used on a large scale by serious advertisers.
Of course. That was my entire point. The spam, the vote-selling, the shit content being “advertised,” the disengagement, the lack of accountability...this all became a bigger issue after the protocols were changed. They are all symptoms/consequences of last year’s hard forks.
I could explain in detail why/how the hard forks created these problems...which I’ve done many times over since last summer, including before they were implemented. And back then - just like now - nobody listened. But just for good measure, I suppose I’ll detail this again in a separate post. Too long to cover all of the various aspects of it here.
Are you really surprised by this though? Most of our “developers” here are hobbyists or first-timers developing in the social media space. They unfortunately don’t know the fundamentals of social media and user interests...and the users here aren’t typical SM users/content creators either, so both sides skew the metrics. Then we have the actual results of the voting/allocation and displays skewing it even further.
There isn’t even enough of a critical mass of users for real-world advertisers to even consider spending advertising dollars here. Anyone looking at the actual viewing and engagement stats - even for “trending” posts - would quickly look elsewhere to spend their money.
But even if we assume that advertising here actually gained visibility and returned some profit for businesses, it would be more beneficial to them to buy the STEEM once and use it repeatedly for self-voting or self-promotion, not rent space on the trending page for every post they make.
This is the mistake that current users continue to make as well. They pay for temporary advertisement and have nothing to show for it when the advertising period is over. So they’re stuck in this perpetual loop of paying for visibility over and over again when they could simply buy the STEEM outright and get perpetual use out of it.
But this happens in the real world all the time as well. People often rent for the wrong reasons and think that they’re coming out on top financially, but they truly believe that there’s no other way. They continue to do what keeps them poor...so they remain poor, even if it’s just relative to those who are “richer.”
And we have a ton of admittedly real-world poor people here on Steem/Steemit. Does anyone truly wonder why things are the way they are around here?
Wow, you are one of the few witnesses that actually understands a social network. You got my vote
The last point you made is spot on. In the long run users are much better off using those SBD's convert to SP and build their influence. Very few understand this but the steem blockchain rewards very well those who invest in it, compound interest is powerful but users have to be patient, it's not an overnight get rich quick thing.
Same goes for self voting, in the long run this strategy is detrimental. Because users isolate themselves by doing this and will end up being the only ones voting for their post instead of many that they could have supported through their upvotes.
I believe most of the issues on steem are self correcting, some of them also comes from the fact that the user base is still tiny. The moderation one however is critical IMHO. Posts on steem only have likes, they have no dislikes. This is problematic because there is no balance in the system.
I agree. I am very new to this but I want to say I am getting a creepy cult vibe from a lot of the comment sections because there is no hard way to challenge content you dislike. And when I look at what ends up on top I'm like WHAT??!! WHYY
I know what you mean, I'm getting the same vibe..comments on steem are monotonous, most of the discussions are boring and unexciting imo.
If users were incentivized to moderate content, then all the content that provides no value would get downvoted and the quality of interactions would increase greatly.
The constant drama on steem is a direct result of users lacking the tools to moderate this site. Vote buying abuse would be a no issue if downvoting was profitable.
Although... what would stop the power players from buying downvotes and bombing whomever they didnt like into oblivion
This is true, but it is also true that doing so is highly profitable, thus our allopathic medical establishment.
You failed to elucidate the underlying problem, IMHO, which is stake-weighting. Stake-weighting is also the source of meatspace problems, but Steemit makes it worse by directly linking financial holdings to societal power. At least in RL that link is obscured by rhetoric and the need to corrupt society covertly.
The virtues of society aren't even mostly financial. Simply making everything about money degrades society, and stake-weighting guarantees this. As a result, pimps and war profiteers are better rewarded in RL, just as on Steemit.
This is the root of the problem. All else is a symptom.