Solutions to bring Steemit to the Mainstream. Discussion thread. Share Your Solutions. Help Us Attract Steem Developers Attention. Lets Make Steem One of the Top 10 Global Media Platforms!
Steem has a major vulnerability that will eventually crash the economic value of steem. This same vulnerability makes it difficult for new authors to get started on steem, which is the single most important factor for mainstream adoption.
The problem is that steem users are not incentivized to consistently find new authors to follow and upvote. In fact, the system seems to encourage users to focus entirely on upvoting their own posts, and the posts of friends that return the favor.
Since there is no penalty for building totally automated likebot networks, it is encouraging investors to put money into steem for the singular purpose of upvoting their own content to gain a ROI. The more investors that use steem in this way without interacting with the rest of the community, the less value steem will hold in the global market. Eventually, if enough investors are turning their accounts into ROI bot-cows, the market will become flooded with steem that not enough people want, because normal users arn't making enough money..... because the whales with the real steem power are mostly giving it to themselves to resell.
How do we solve this? I have an solution that will fix this vulernability AND give more funds to starting steem authors. This solution is a new steem variable..... For this example, lets call it "Steem Influence".
Steem influence would act as a multiplier to steem power. If a user only upvotes their own content and the content of their friends, their influence will slowly drop. To regain influence, the user must upvote the content of other users whom they have never interacted with before.
Here is an example formula to implement this solution.
-5 out of every 20 upvotes must be given to users whom the upvoter has only interacted with at most 5 times in the last 3 months.
-1 out of every 20 upvotes must be given to a user whom the upvoter has never interacted with before.
-For every 20 votes that the user makes that do not meet the above criteria, the users Steem Influence Score drops by one point.
-Every user starts at 100% influence. As their influence drops, so to does their steem power. Down to a minimum of 40% total voting power.
-To regain influence the user must interact with new users whom they haven't interacted with before.
These numbers are just an example of a functional algorithm. I'm sure all those numbers can and should be fine tuned before implementation.
I want to hear your solutions for this problem. My solution is not the only way. I'll be upvoting my favorite solutionary comments to this thread. I invite you to do the same.
I also invite you to tag any developers you know. We wish to talk to them.
We represent a media alliance with over 10 million followers. We are very interested in bringing steem to the mainstream, and we have the channels to do so. We want to know if the steem developers will work with us to bring steem to the point where we can post about it on sites like https://www.facebook.com/CollectiveEvolutionPage/.
It's an honor to be here with you my fellow Steemian. Lets bring Steem to the Mainstream! Together!
I would love for this thread to be about all kinds of solutions for steemit! I will be upvoting good solutions and following the authors providing them. I invite you to do the same.
Speaking of solutions! Our Earth Nation team made a Free Steemit Academy! Check it out at https://awakening-sovereignty-collective.teachable.com/p/steemit-academy.
Heres another solution! We made the EN steemit upvote guild. By joining our team you receive;
We are developing a new kind of software system to allow any other group on steemit to create their own guild with huge benefits. These guilds will have interoperability functionalities to create maximum synergy and engagement between Steemians.
Were testing out our guild system as a core group for about 30 days before we open it up to all of steemit.
Um ...clue me in, Im new here, how exactly do we upvote?
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We can talk about this on the #BeyondBitcoin #Whaletank, please RSVP tomorrow on @officialfuzzy or any time and let me know, I'd like to address this too. It's either a HF or going to #EOS for example.
Only prob is this assumes bots cannot simply make new accounts using anonsteem to start carousel voting.
I remember when fyrstikken had this cool bot that "upvoted all new accounts" to "help users". He went around asking whales to support and delegate sp to it because it would "help minnows so much".
But at that time he was buddies with noganoo and noganoo had a bunch of sockpuppets. I always thought it was a but odd that someone who threatens to kill others, ruin their lives and hire people to beat them up would be "so for the people"...and this is i suspect why he was promoting it.
So this solution as i see it (unless im missing something) just gives them incentive to say "now your delegation will make us lots more money on all these fake accounts we have joining steem. The circle jerk needs to evolve though".
I do not think reputation systems should be on the chain itself. In fact what should happen is that different sites (like busy for instance) should set up their own reputation systems that use blockchain data.
Well I disagree with you there, exactly reputation systems should be open. But that said, if your are going to do analytics on your database will you store it in the same database i.e. the blockchain? Is that what is normally done? I guess reputation is accumulated so that would be a yes then.
Very good explanation. . Good job @fuzzyvest.
I don't know if it is really viable to always be connecting with new authors. Say for example you have 20 authors you really like and you really only got so much time to tune into so much.
I think some of the concentration of wealth is a result of many people who've been here awhile. I think over time there will be more distribution. Another thing is that cryptocurrency is brand new to many new users of the platform...and many new users have not taken the plunge to invest into their accounts. It's not that you have to invest in your account by purchasing steem....but everyone who does purchase steem does in fact help grow the value of the network.
Cool concept of starting at 100 rep and going from there. Though not sure that's a good indicator either because reputation is built over time...though i guess with approach outlined to hold a solid rep rating you would have to keep at it....though with the approach you outlined it would definitely create false positives in terms of reputation,,,which would actually not really be a true indicator of the legitimacy of an individuals rep.
The real value here is in community, that is for sure. The community is large and will grow larger...in a way it makes sense that "tribes" develop so to speak of core groups of people that regularly support one another..I mean it's pretty cool...it takes time to cultivate and develop such relationships. It's something I would like to work on for myself.
I think there is value in not having too much rule or enforcement. Reminds me of lao tzu and how he speaks about rules and laws of a society/community....where the less rules and laws - the more prosperous the society/community is.
welcome to steemit :)
Hi @worldclassplayer. Thank you!
Something that would make implimenting this idea easy for everyone.... would be to use a curation system to delegate a few votes a day to a curator who specalizes in finding new authors! This would enable everyone to keep their influence at 100% on autopilot while also maximizing on their curation rewards.
options/opportunity for delegates and delegation is cool and practical as a general point.
the 100% influence point - will have to let that sink in for a bit and play around with it.
Good idea! I've also written about this 6 days long ago and came to the same conclussion-sollution as you! Coincidence? : )
I must agree with you @worldclassplayer "I think there is value in not having too much rule or enforcement." I have only been on Steemit for one month so obviously not as experienced with the entire operation. What caused me to even look at Steemit was the fact it was a community based platform which embraces the whole. The $cryptocurrency is a big plus as it moves us away from the central banks, but was not my deciding factor.
From what I can see thus far is that the Steemit platform is more of a "pay for performance" strategy and that appeals to me. I am moving away from a social network that has taken it upon itself to censor and manipulate their platform in such a way it is not beneficial to put together work teams or even for an individual to exercise their right to free speech.
Here I feel the community will monitor their own community. If our performance is worthy,we benefit. If it is not, we do not benefit. This should eventually take care of alot of the househeeping issues on its own. I may change my mind later down the road as the platform grows and changes as it surely will, but for now I see no need to commandeer new rules and restrictions.
I only hope that which ever direction we take that peace be the journey, @vickiebarker
Yes, Yes, and Yes @vickiebarker and @worldclassplayer. I agree with all points you have both shared and resonated with.
And, i want to bring to your awareness.... If steem continues like this its currency value is going to tank to the point where potentially it will become nearly impossible to sell.
Even if mathmatics and economics are not your specalialty..... please stay with me as i try to explain this.
A users steem power when upvoting increases the value of a post by 1 cent per 100 dollars worth of steem. 1000 dollars is 10 cents. 10000 dollars is 1 dollar. 1 million dollars is 100 dollars. 100 million dollars is 10000 dollars.
If each user can vote 10 times a day at full power, thats 100k dollars worth of steem each day for a 100 million dollar investment. Thats 36.5M dollars a year. A 3 year ROI. Thats OFF THE HOOK. When steem gets big investors WILL BE ALL OVER THIS.
If an agency put a billion dollars into steemit, they would produce 365 million dollars worth of steemit a year.
If multiple agencies put a combined 10 billion into steem, they would produce 3.65 billion dollars worth of steemit a year.
Do you know what would happen then? The price of steem would plummet and no one would be able to cash out their currency, because theres 100s of billions of dollars of steem on the market and not nearly enough money out there to buy it.......
Please.... Do you see how this math stacks up? Here at the Earth Nation, we very seriously want to bring millions of users into steem..... We can't the way it is now though, because we know that investors out there will flood the market as soon as they feel confident about their return based on current algorithms.
Please help us fix this vulnerability so we can start bringing our greater networks into this project. One way or another this must be fixed or it will crash the steemit network exchange value and make steem close to worthless.
mmm not sure about that maybe you can expand or clarify.
If 10's of billion of dollars come into steem.....and many of those steem are into steem power....that's locking a lot of the steem power up.
sounds like the thinking highlighted in your concern is that if billions of dollars come in from investors/agencies that we will eventually flood the market and dump it ....which would crash it. This sounds like an ineffective approach from the investor/agency perspective.
I think the point perhaps being missed here is that with increased user adoption and also investor increases...we have multiple compounding network effects....which would likely result in more trading/exchanging within the network...the more a thing is recognized as having value the less one has to "try" to sell it or convert it into something else to be able to actually use it.
curious to here your perspective.
This way of thinking is a bit flawed and here is why.. Lets say you try to buy 1 billion $ worth steem to convert to steem power.. That will affect the price of each steem coin tremendously, price per steem will skyrocket! Next time when you try to buy 1 billion $ worth of steem you will get much less steem coins! Do you see what I am getting at? It seems like you base your argument on static steem price?
And yes I agree with you we need a way to "explore" new authors "quality" posts, without spending hours after hours! I can imagine that it must be frustrating for new authors to get noticed by people with impactful SP!
Next question is who decides which post is a “quality” post? Everyone have different interests/agenda. We need a mechanism to incentivize people to find new "quality" posts but not by forcing anyone to do so. If someone can program an algorithm that fact checks peoples posts would be awesome :D
Maybe if we have a similar system like “witnesses”. If we can vote for steemians that we have similar tastes with and find reliable in every single tag/topic that you are interested in and they get paid to find new authors that they might think that you would like. That might save a lot of time for many people. I am a bit drunk atm and I thought that I had to comment on this reply: D I will get back to you tomorrow!
Yes, we should have a delegated curation team (DCT) per niche where they are voted in monthly by members of the community.
Exactly.. how will we pay for them tho?
They should automatically receive a percentage of the steem reward pool. They should be rated by delegated members and based on that rating, it influences their stake of the reward.
Because they curated it first they should get the biggest piece of the pie.
Sounds like a reasonable solution to the evident problem.
Time is the biggest factor for most however. As much as I would love to consistently find the great work of unrecognised authors, to do so would require a fair bit of time. The incentive should not be simply to upvote the work of a stranger, but to upvote the GREAT work of a stranger.
To simplify this process would help. Like a curation group who resteem quality posts receiving little attention into one account where we can take our pick.
Have upped & resteemed this for extra exposure. It is certainly a subject worth discussing.
I suspect there will be some big changes announced at SteemFest next month.
Thank you for your support and resonance @samstonehill.
I agree, a curation group, or even multiple creation groups for different catagories would be very helpful to reduce the amount of time spent looking through content.
Another way to simplify this process.... would be to use an automation system that delegates a few votes each day to a curator who specifically targets new and different users consistantly. Through the application we are building this will be an easy process. In fact, it will be effortless(after setup) to have a curator that matches your style to delegate your choice of votes to each day.
Thank you for your support Samstonehill~! May we discover and impliment how to bring this platform to the mainstream.
There is build-a-whale for this
Another aspect to this is what is one legitimately operates in a small circle. What I mean is if one is interested in a subject that isnt widely popular, there might be only a few people on here who are interested in that topic. Hence, all voting would be among them.
For example, if bird watching was one's interest, is there a wide variety of people commenting on that subject? It might be just where someone chooses to steem and, suddenly, they are penalized.
A intelligent and thoughtful perspective @taskmaster4450.
Yes... In a case use such as this.... Someone into a exceptionally niche subject would either have to delegate a few votes to a curator.... or would have to expand into another subject. Or they would become penalized.
In this case.... to me, this seems to be a question of the lesser of two negatives. Should we save the bird watchers from a penalty, at the expense of the entire steem ecosystem? Would that serve the bird watchers if steem lost its economic value to an a flooding of steem on the market?
Perhaps.... there is another way? Yet.... we have not been able to discover it yet. So, until a better solution is presented....
Should we forgo penalizing niche circles at the expense of the entire steem network?
Yes. THERE IS AN EVIDENT PROBLEM. I noticed that in a program, Steem Voter. I did not see any help from them. Like many programs online.
hello sir. I have an idea that you could help have a reach more than me: a simple "choose" button next to the upvote designed to send the post to a curator group that only other steemians can use.
Instead of going to discord to promote your post, other users can do it for you! We can also bring discord on a click away while being on steemit.
It's like the "promote" button but free and with a targeted curator team that will choose how worth is the post and upvote it accordingly.
There could also be a sub-menu that will pop out when clicking on "choose" where you can select the tags or the curator team you want the post to be addressed on like for example a "choose-for-art" tag or "choose-for-curatorteam1" and so on...
Regarding the bots problem eventually abusing the button then we will have made a "trap" for those bots/users where they click for their own fate more like a rat-trap for abusers and scammers.
people like @sherlockholmes and @spaminator even @steemcleaners would have an easier job collecting those "predators" as they would fall into them by their own act
So in the end one would chose wisely and honestly who should be on the curator's eye
I just thought right this moment that a "choosenot" button could also be implemented right next to "chose" for the reason mentioned above in this post of reducing or limiting one's influence
"chose" could also be very well "influence"
As someone who is brand new to Steemit it, I couldn't agree more. I'm very excited to become part of the collective and have managed to connect with some great content makers already however, it's only by sifting through a lot of what I can only describe as rubbish. I class myself as an adventurer and photographer but I'm struggling to find the great content I expected to. I'm assuming it's there but I'm having to plough my way through too much of what I'm assuming is auto-generated content to find the hidden gems. And there are some real hidden gems out there so think a curation group is a really great idea.
Agree with you.... Its been barely a month for me on steem and I can already feel the presence of whales and hoarders and how they are making money fast...
The rich gets richer here only. There needs to be an upgrade.
Excellent idea @earthnation the problems always arise when people see an easy way to make a quick return. The whole essence of Steem should be about finding new subjects within the community that could be of interest for you. This could be a way to get only get back if you put the correct effort in and give back.
You are right. To get this to a different level and get Steem to a higher value, they should implement a way of enhancing the social spirit among members. Otherwise, people have the tendency of follow those whose numbers are higher. Good point. Upvote. And resteemit, so your thought are read by more people.
This is a strong argument for a great idea. Well done!
I hope it will be considered by @ned and users will be incentivized to interact with new people on a weekly basis in the curation rewards.
I agree, the system is become anti-human or antisocial even with all these bots- Im not against bots, indeed, we are all going to have to get used to them.Perhaps limiting the amount of accounts someone can have as well as the number of bots? -
I love the influence idea of having to vote for new users, an excellent way and one that should be seriously looked at in any new fork in the future.
Your suggestion could address one problem but there are others than voting. The fact tgat interaction through comments on this platform is not rewarded, worries me a lot more. Your suggestion applied to comments to other (new) authors could be valuable. You would get influence through commenting on:
A) new authors
B) your comments getting sub comments from other (new) authors
Unfortunately the platform allows bots and this is not penalized. I see spamprofiles with a total of 142 comments (all spam) and a profile score of 57 because their comments were upvoted automatically.
I was enthusiastic about Steemit for a while made more than 800 contributions 30 + articles and a hell of a lot thoughtful and long comments. My profile is at 50 still...
Sigh, moving on to the next platform. I just don't see any commitment from Steemit Inc to keep users happy.
The problem with rewarding comments is that this will increase the comment spam problem not decrease it.
I would suggest that when there are bots that spam comments and votes...there should be the more bots that punish comment spam and auto votes. The steem blockchain has the tools to regulate itself with flagging content if you find enough stakeholders for the good cause this will improve the experience.
By the way, SteemIt Inc can't directly change those rules, this can only be done by the witnesses. And they are elected by all members together.
I agree if the metric is simply the comment #, what should be rewarded is the (organic) interaction a comment generates.
Does it generate subcomments? are those comments upvoted.
but I agree it is difficult to put in place rules that can´t be gamed by automation.
Flagging is a miserable failure as far as I can tell:
you can´t manually flag automated behaviour
flagging sets you up for retaliation flags, so no one bothers
Dissenting opinions are flagged by whale profiles, so no healthy debate is possible
as far as I can tell, flagging is not steering behaviours consistently
Overall I´d say the platform as is, is screwed in the medium term, unless some serious attention is paid to improving the overall user experience. But Steemit Inc. obviously is not interested in getting this out of Beta, they are gunning for the big bucks by inventing an ICO bypass with their media token.
I think that strategy is seriously flawed, sure it might make the token more valuable but if that attracts even more users (and bots) to the platform in it´s current state it might mean the whole thing will collapse more quickly. The whole concept is shoddy as a social network and it simply won´t survive a huge influx of new users because it will only make the overall user experience worse for everyone. So people come, try it, don´t get results, decide they don´t like it and abandon it... Really hoping for some magical rabbit out of the hat to be announced at Steemfest...
I can agree with the analysis about the problem but I think it can be solved. It might take time but I see so many ppl working and thinking about the solution. Also many of the whales because it’s in their long term interest to.
I hope so . There seems to be some movement now with the redesign. Need to explore it still. Really hope it is more than some new colours....
I hope it is fixable but it needs to become a priority... a social media token with a crappy social media experience simply won't take off...
One thing they did not bother to fix is the notification flags... arghhh how difficult can that be since 4 months I don 't get a flag if someone replies to me... kinda basic...
Did you take a look at other frontends? Notification is not a Blockchain function. Maybe you find e.g. Busy.org more like your style.