Which came first, the Engagement or the Reward?

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)


Photo by victoriawhite on flickr, labelled CC2.


I haven't done a discussion post in forever, so let's see how engaged I can get my followers. :)

I'm sure most of you have heard the old parable, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?". If you didn't pay attention in high school biology, it's a cute little paradox -- if you did pay attention though, you're pretty aware that the thing that laid the chicken we know of today, was basically a less-evolved chicken. Another fun form of this parable-paradox would be "What happens when an immovable object encounters an unstoppable force?"

Our Steemit equivalent, I believe to be, is "Which came first, the engagement or the reward?" Ever seen a post on trending with few comments, and few views? Ever seen a buried treasure with tons of views and comments, but no reward? Over time, the first post will hopefully gather comments, and the second will hopefully gather reward... but which should come first?

I believe these two things are more intertwined than we initially come to believe. We all know the main reason why people are here on Steemit (HINT: It's not the UI), but which does, or should, come first: the reward that we are here for, or the engagement?


A little about me...

Steemit isn't fair. It's never been fair. Take me for an example; let's face it, my photography is terrible. I'm just some amateur that sometimes takes a half decent picture with a half decent camera, and happened to have visited a bunch of half-decent places. There are an uncountable number of photographers that are mind-bogglingly better than I am, and when they first come to Steemit, they're not likely to immediately match what I have previously been rewarded for my photos. So why is that?

Well, there's a few obvious reasons. The primary being my follower count. With over 1,800, I've amassed a significant chunk. You could argue that this is the main driver of success here: a huge audience. Or maybe you're a bit more clever, and understanding the steem distribution, realize it's not the number in the audience but rather the aggregate influence of the audience. A few important characters with extreme influence in your audience, makes a world of difference. Thus, the community (and engagement on your posts) matters quite a bit. But how does that high follower count come to be?

In my case, I built a following starting a year ago, right after Steemit launched. I wasn't anyone famous, and no one in the community knew me -- I wasn't a bitshares name like a lot of people were at the start, nor did I ever blog before. But I interacted with the (then small) community, made myself known, and became somewhat infamous for being 'the cheetah bot guy'. This launched me into a steem witness spot too, making me an ever more well-known figure in Steemit land. While starting early gave me an advantage, getting involved with the community was far more relevant and important to increasing my rewards.

I've made a fair chuck in rewards this past year, and I will be forever grateful for having the opportunity to do so. With that said, I'd say I started with the engagement, and then got the reward. In a way, some people are voting for me as a person, rather than necessarily the exact content that I produce.

In general, you might be thinking by now "Of course that's how it works! You have to build a following." and you might be right. However, famous people come to Steemit and immediately make a huge reward, sometimes without even engaging. Perhaps the reward is expected, as their popularity and influence brings theoretical value to the platform when they join. So that begs the question...

Can Rewards come first?

Can the reward come before the engagement? In a way, this recent hardfork to linearize reward has attempted to flatten the distribution of reward, such that the highly popular have less reward, and the "middle class" of Steemit has the new opportunity to see a drastic improvement in their influence. Now, more than ever, we can put the reward before the engagement, as the ability to reward is less concentrated in the hands of the few. Of course, one still has to minimally engage in order to be qualified for a reward (need a post or comment to vote on), so the real question is the quality of the engagement relative to the reward. You can perhaps think of this situation as a post that is voted highly before it is even digested or otherwise engaged with.

There are a few arguments I can think of where putting the reward first is useful:

  1. Enticement.
    • The enticement of reward draws people to contribute and engage further, and the desire to build a following.
  2. Positivity.
    • A reward is positive feedback!
  3. Promotion.
    • A high reward draws in new people to look at, and engage with, a post.

But I don't think this is reason enough. Here's some counter arguments on the situation, and reasons why I believe that the engagement should come before the reward.

  1. The tragedy of the commons.
    • If everyone seeks to maximize their own reward, overall community support and involvement will dwindle, and resources will deplete.
  2. Plastic dolls.
    • Some famous people cross-post content on Steemit, but do not engage with the community. They paint themselves as pretty and superficial plastic dolls, figurines with no internals. This even leads to incentivize identity theft, as scammers try to latch on to the fame of others to try and get a quick buck, knowing that famous people will be well rewarded.
  3. Laser focus on rewards.
    • People who know they have a large following, or know every post they create will be well rewarded, will often take advantage of it by focusing on quantity instead of quality. Or people will spam comments like 'great post', in hopes to get an upvote. And at worst, people will abuse the platform with plagiarism to defraud voters.
    • P.S. Abuse on steemit is at an all time high. Is that the canary in the coal mine, once again?
  4. 'Deserve' mentality.
    • Some people begin to expect rewards, or expect voters to continue to vote for them.

What does it all mean?

So, what's all this discussion about? This wasn't just word vomit, I promise I do actually have a point. To generalize: perhaps we should be more careful with rewards. With a high price of steem, and newfound influence of the middle class, one could be quick to think that everything is fine and dandy. However, with the new ability to reward only our friends or ourselves with all our influence, we run a great risk; if people focus on the reward rather than the engagement and community building, we could quickly collapse into a self-serving, reward-leeching scenario.

As linear rewards also mean voting for oneself is easy and profitable: a true tragedy of the commons will occur if everyone only voted for themselves "because that's what everyone else is doing". Quality will degrade, and efforts will focus not on providing value, but rather on extracting reward. If this happens, we are likely to see another steem bear market, as a new fire cleans out those not soley here for reward, once again. To prevent that, I believe we now need altruism more than ever.

What are your thoughts on the engagement versus rewards paradox? Does the current linear situation have you thrilled, or concerned? Do you have more or less faith in humanity than I do? I'd like to hear your comments below!

And with that said, time to change gears for a bit and talk about my own voting.



The paradox of more voting power on curation.

There's another friendly Steemit paradox that I encountered: The ability to greatly reward a post, actually reduces your own potential curation reward as a percentage of your influence. A bit confusing, but let me explain.

A few months ago, I created a voting bot that strategically voted for posts to maximize curation reward. I found myself as a top curator, frequently catching posts before a larger curation trail voted for it. I then set myself up as an available curator on streemian to enable other Steemians to automatically follow my vote. Over time, many Steemians started following my votes (and a big thank you to them!), at which point in time I noticed that I was no longer catching posts before other larger curators... I WAS the large curator!

What I found happening is that I could reward a post well enough on my own, and in such, the other curator just picked a new post to reward. In a way, it became a sort of implicit sharing of curating; "you get this post, I'll get that post", rather than piling on to the same person as I did before.

With great power comes great responsibility.

When I found myself with new influence, my old strategy didn’t work as well. Come hardfork19, this difference was further magnified, and I'm now re-organizing my voting strategy. Moving forward with my own votes and the new linear reward, I'm going to completely scrap any focus on maximizing curation reward, and instead focus on rewarding under-valued, quality content, and spreading smaller rewards to more deserving users, since it is now feasible to do so! I am going to have most of my votes picked by manual curators, and follow their choices with a small power. If you feel like joining me in this curation endeavour, check out streemian.com where you can follow me as a curator!

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Agree. Self voting is a great challenge brought to us by HF19. We can ask people to behave unselfish, but it will have a little effect, becouse system incentivize selfishness more. Rather we shoul get back to non-linear reward curve (but not quadratic one) for that we should get some kind of proposal and vote for wittnesses that agree with it. We have ability to change system from its core, why don't go that way?

You nailed the biggest risks.

So, what's all this discussion about? This wasn't just word vomit, I promise I do actually have a point. To generalize: perhaps we should be more careful with rewards. With a high price of steem, and newfound influence of the middle class, one could be quick to think that everything is fine and dandy. However, with the new ability to reward only our friends or ourselves with all our influence, we run a great risk; if people focus on the reward rather than the engagement and community building, we could quickly collapse into a self-serving, reward-leeching scenario.

As linear rewards also mean voting for oneself is easy and profitable: a true tragedy of the commons will occur if everyone only voted for themselves "because that's what everyone else is doing". Quality will degrade, and efforts will focus not on providing value, but rather on extracting reward. If this happens, we are likely to see another steem bear market, as a new fire cleans out those not soley here for reward, once again. To prevent that, I believe we now need altruism more than ever.

There has to be an element that rewards altruism and also rewards getting other people to agree with you.

Usually more. I also bought 15k Steem this week.

Y'know, you're kinda adding to my concern by upvoting your own comment here to almost $100.
:/

I addressed this earlier today. It's a fair point. So are mine. It's a nuanced issue. I have also demonstrated in many ways that my time horizon for Steem is long term -- by earning a ton of steem writing, curating, commenting for over a year, by buying more Steem on a net basis than all but a handful of people, and by buying a chunk of Steem this week. But read on my full comments.

https://steemit.com/games/@lukestokes/table-top-game-reviews-mastermind#@eeks/re-lukestokes-re-eeks-re-lukestokes-table-top-game-reviews-mastermind-20170623t155051189z

Neither here nor there, I was an early supporter of Cheetah, and you've always been one of my favorite Steemians.

Thanks for the explanation link! Nuanced indeed, hence my post about it.
I think it's worth you making a post about your views. It is absolutely a valid point of view saying that it's within your right to do so. But I'd say @liberosist has a good response here worth reading. You and other large stakeholders might stand to achieve a higher return on investment long term, by spending the extra effort on voting on content that will make us go to the mainstream.

And secondly, thanks for the support -- it's greatly appreciated! :)

I regularly try and upvote content that is underseen but it's hard when most people just herd into crap like TDV and the same 10 people, half of whom are snakeoil salesmen. That's a harder problem to solve. I take the tact of trying to encourage and cultivate pretty random writers who add something. It's a mixed bag but we've also seen that sign-ups have been gated because of costs that may now be resolved so maybe we'll see more competition and real growth.

One thing I've noticed though is that in terms of time and rewards, previously curating was more valuable than upvoting my own content by a lot. Curating depending on being a thought leader and being rewarded for that -- it involved other people agreeing with you for good returns. This simplification alters that dynamic and removes the dependence of my rewards on other people for me as an orca.

It's early yet, anything that happens in the next months is transient, so more experimentation to be had.

People just earn almost a hundred dollars by upvoting their own content.

haha so powerful! nice photo .
want to share a window view from Uruguay, where I live.

DSC_0041-2.jpg
hope you enjoy

At least now there is a middle class!!! 10 months ago it was only top and bottom class. Crypto geeks and pretty girls were receiving getting crazy rewards, And Blogs with meat and credibility were staying under radar.... There is a lot more good stuff around now than 6 month ago

Yep. This should spread things out more. I think HF19 is a good iteration but were have more ways to go to get to the right balance.

The rewards, of course :)

You're spot on - we need to curate responsibly, as a community. We should stop mindlessly voting on just our friends and ourselves, and on the trending posts. Besides, that's a sure fire way to kill off all your curation rewards.

The community must be educated to vote on great, undiscovered content and promote them. There's a significant incentive in the curation rewards system that favours voting on such content versus posts that are already trending.

Despite a largely positive HF19, I'm afraid after HF19 I see a lot of engaged curators with large SP holdings (or delegated) give out 10%-25% for others, while saving 100% for themselves and their friends/colluders. That's not the desired behaviour of the voting power rate change. This should be called out as questionable behaviour.

Everyone needs to read these comments from @liberosist!

Excellent post, I sadly missed reading it! Definitely agree with you. I do think it will take a large mindset overhaul, as the majority of the early adopters are all crypto nuts, and we love our crypto news... I'm guilty of following and voting for this stuff because it's presently valuable to me (e.g., I would have completely missed the byteballs airdrop if it wasn't for @kingscrown; he's always on the ball with crypto info.)

Despite a largely positive HF19, I'm afraid after HF19 I see a lot of engaged curators with large SP holdings (or delegated) give out 10%-25% for others, while saving 100% for themselves and their friends/colluders.

This is interesting, and I'm already guilty of saving 100% votes (e.g. for @steemcleaners logs). I have a strong feeling this will become the norm. It makes me curious; how much will people now consider a post to be "already too valuable" and not vote on it. In this case, not voting for oneself may end up with the same reward at the end of the day, as more people might be inclined to increase the reward, instead of the power user increasing it themselves.

We opened a whole can of worms with this hardfork, should be interesting to see it play out.

For the longest time, I was partial to the view that this is a free open market and everyone should do as they please. Of course, I still believe that, but I've come around to the notion that there should be accountability and the players should act in the best interests of the community rather than their own.

We have a real shot at making this place special, but I'm afraid we are curating sub-optimally right now. It is about time the top stakeholders of the platform took responsibility. Stop delegating SP to people you like, stop voting on your friends, start voting for authors that have a chance of attracting the mainstream. It's in the best interests of the community and the stakeholders themselves. I can promise you if the Trending page was replaced by engaging content the mainstream audience can enjoy, this network has a real chance at hitting dozens of millions of users in short order. Stakeholders stand to gain millions of dollars, if only they stop being myopic and look at the bigger picture.

I have limited reach, few would ever read my opinion. My hope is influencers like yourself can start a serious and involved discussion on the matter. I would greatly appreciate it.

There's the free market, and then there's cutting down fruit trees for firewood. If somebody with a $10,000 stake can upvote their own posts and comments to something like $700 a week, 7% per week!, there's no way that the current economy can be sustainable. Maybe a couple of months of that, and then we go back to $0.02, and the $10000 turns into $1000, against the trend of the whole crypto market, and everybody will cry foul.

  • let's have a 2-4 daily post limit
  • comment rewards limited to a % of that of the post itself

This upvoting of one's own comments is not stimulating interaction, and it's in bad taste. It always was lame, now it's completely over the top.

Yeah, definitely see your point. Stakeholders being myopic is exactly the tragedy of the commons that I often talk about.

I have always wanted there to be a separate trending page on steemit: a front facing one with normal blogs, and a circlejerk internal trending page. My post here would fit in the latter. Perhaps communities, when they arrive, can help this this kind of separation.

I think you have a bigger reach than you think. I personally regard your opinion extremely highly due to all the effort you have put in this platform, and I know I am not the only one. As for my influence, I still struggle to get people to pay attention to plagiarism. :p
If you have ideas to push this forward, you'll have my support for sure.

I have always wanted there to be a separate trending page on steemit: a front facing one with normal blogs, and a circlejerk internal trending page. My post here would fit in the latter. Perhaps communities, when they arrive, can help this this kind of separation.

Precisely, communities should solve this issue, but it would also require the voters to act responsibly. There'll no longer be an excuse of "Oh, this is important, it must be trending!", but the voters still have to learn to vote on valuable posts that'll attract users to the network.

Top authors can also disable curation rewards on their posts to disincentivize vote piling. That seems like an altruistic act, but most top authors are holding Steem/Power that stands to gain value if they help reshape the Trending page.

I'm aware some people are listening to me, but at the end of the day I prefer working behind the scenes. I don't have any political skills and don't intend to learn. I don't really have any ideas on how to push this forward, but that's where I'm counting on influencers and witnesses. As the abit experiment proves, the community has the power to unite. If a couple of influential people got together and made a pact to not vote on circlejerk posts, pull back delegations to irresponsible curators, look to vote on new authors, I'm sure it'll happen. It's as simple as someone taking the initiative and making it happen.

That someone isn't going to be me :)

Hey liberosist, I'm curious if you know of anybody who'd be interested in leasing out their SP for a small fee. It would be for a voting application that I'm building which will target comments specifically, and I'd strongly commit to no self-voting or anything like that.

I'm guessing that everybody you know who has spare SP has already delegated it to @curie or some such, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

Funny, I'm looking to lease out SP too. Your best bet would be @neoxian. Come find me on Steemit.chat (http for now, not s) or Discord liberosist#1871.

Ah, that's why I can't access Steemite chat.

I actually found someone for the time being...

I'm going to completely scrap any focus on maximizing curation reward, and instead focus on rewarding under-valued, quality content, and spreading smaller rewards to more deserving users, since it is now feasible to do so!

The community must be educated to vote on great, undiscovered content and promote them.

Many good points on this comment @liberosist. I've been observing this phenomenon that you point out from the first day. I've been here on steemit basically around the same time as you and @anyx (11 months ago) however, look the distinct results in the value of my account and wallet.

I am stuck with a Rep53.. well, since ever. And my SP does not even reach the 100 mark so far after 11 months of engagement. Consequently, I have not yet even been able to earn me the vote slider either. So go figure!!

I've already published a good lot of posts specifically addressed to this pernicious problem of blind upvoters & mindless bots. Just the same as with the curators who simply vote for their own interests and gains without first reading the content from top to bottom on the posts they are voting up.

I've been waiting patiently backstage for some logical and positive changes on this platform in order to improve and enhance true live engagement and solidarity between steemians. Where the sense of creating community, collaboration and healthy common growth be the first goal and slogan. But I think that there are still many others hard forks and changes ahead to reach that point. Unfortunately!!

Finally, and to make this comment short. I would like to shamelessly draw your attention towards an article that I would appreciate some support, diffusion and promotion by both of you. I think this is for a good cause that unfortunately gone undiscovered & unnoticed by the community and also highly underrated and under-valued.

I invite you to read the post and hopefully both of you feel gratified with the probable curation rewards from this post and also look gorgeous inside and out for the next steemit's photography.

Cheers! :)

You joined at the same time as us, sure, but it looks like you only started being active when the price and subsequently blogging difficulty went us. Many of us have stuck with Steem and believed in it through the hard times. When the price hit $0.10 virtually everyone left. There were only a few hundred of us who stuck around, and we gained large followers and were rewarded a significant portion of the reward pool. That went on for nearly 6 months before Steem started growing again. The reward pool is the same in terms of Steem Power rewarded, and it was really easy to get to the Trending page. Now the blogging difficulty and competition is way up, it's much harder to get the same kind of attention.

It's the same as mining difficulty, really. Those who were early to Bitcoin and Ethereum mining could make accumulate thousands of coins. At they time they were worthless, but if you were patient, you would be a millionaire now.

The lesson to learn is - Be patient, be persistent, be early. Keep engaging with the community, if your content is good you'll eventually get some attention. All the best!

its also about finding it early which can be done to luck and then taking action

hey @anyx!

However, with the new ability to reward only our friends or ourselves with all our influence, we run a great risk; if people focus on the reward rather than the engagement and community building, we could quickly collapse into a self-serving, reward-leeching scenario.

I love how you're digging into the seams of our community here anyx. I see this dichotomy play out inside my own head every day on Steem. It happened when I opened your post...there was this little voice that went off in my head (also I am not familiar with your account) about a paragraph down that said

this is a good one! go vote on it before anyone else does

This time, I ignored it and kept reading, but that is ALWAYS THERE. Some days I'm feeling expansive, and I just want to support others that deserve it. Other days I'm feeling needy, and I (perhaps somewhat angrily) upvote shit just for the reward. It's odd...I've felt so many things come up since I joined a month ago. Sometimes I'm insanely excited, some days I feel kind of meh about the whole thing...other days I've met some royally cool people.

I didn't realize that you made Streemian. It's really useful =) I have been donating my vote to curie for a while.

There is this question looming over us all;

What will we become?

I'm hopeful that whatever it is, that many many new friendships will be born.

I like the critical eye on it all anyx, keep it coming

I know the exact dichotomy you're talking about -- I had that when I first started. After some time, and becoming witness, I've been focusing hard on finding ways to become more altruistic, and improve the community as much as I can. I've done this through making @cheetah, and bootstrapping @steemcleaners. I think (and hope) that as people stay here longer, they start thinking about longer term success as you have. :)

And oh, no, @xeroc made streemian! I meant to say that I just set myself up on streemian so I was an available curator. Curie is a fantastic choice to follow too!

I believe that content come before rewards. I have been commenting much, much, more than posting since I have been on Steemit. I still enjoy posting, I just enjoy soaking up all the great info and content that this platform has to offer at this point. I also end up upvoting the posts that I comment on and those whom I create diolauge with. I think that is much more important and fun than spending my time worrying about maximizing my curation rewards. I will however be putting more effort into my posts as I will start blogging soon. Great read, looking forward to more!

I'm so glad that more people are voting on comments nowadays! It's the best way to build a community here, and even a good way to get followers. Nice to see that you're less concerned about rewards and are just having fun! I hope that attitude spreads. :D

I agree, it's not really a reward without the content. Thidb is because you have to earn the reward.

@elderfinancial I like your approach. I find myself in it as well.

@elderfinancial - Great comment "content before rewards". I like the concept of commenting as much or even more than posting. It is this dialog that creates a voice in the community. This is the interaction. This is the connections where we learn and interact. Cheers my friend.

That was a lot of word. But it was good. I don't know. I don't know that the amount rewarded should exceed the work put in. But in special cases like you say, famous people come and since they will attract new users maybe they deserve the reward a little before too. And I do feel the middle class is still powerful. But the vote exchanging has been and will continue happening. Good thing, people like minnow support and whaleshares are helping out newer people! And I don't know, I have mixed feeling about the early reward thing and randowhale etc. I use him sometimes though. You have been here and out in the work. It's like I'm a journeyman apprentice steemian and you up at master or grandmaster. Gotta work your way up, get to know the right people, and offer something valuable. Like this food for thought. Sorry it's such a long response and I'm on esteem so I can't reread as I reply..

Thanks for the feedback! Definitely agree with a lot of what you're saying. The minnow support projects that are popping up will hopefully stick around, and help bring the new wave of minnows up to the middle class. :)

I bought my way in. The first part on accident. And then the second part when I realized how great steemit was. Now I have a little influence and it feels good. I'm trying to do good things too and help a few minnows out with my limited resources. I know you are too!

Hey your bot flagged me using my own tag and has messed with others

It's a long read, but i read it! It is good, with lots of good thinking. If you're talking purely contentwise, no steemit is not really that fair as there are a bunch of people who are actually not interested in reading and just want the rewards somehow. But in the meantime it is fair that the most time you invest in Steemit, the more handsome rewards you are going to get with less efforts, when you get more followers and a larger network. So it depends on whether you consider steemit to be an investment tool or really a place to do blogging and attract readers. I'm not saying both cannot coexist, but we cant deny there are people deeming it as the former only

Hey! I found the little tips on content production to he very useful. Would you say that having such a big audience has changed the way you interact with Steem? Do you feel constrained in any way by your audience?

Thanks for sharing and good luck going forward!

We are attracted to those that we find it satisfying and gratifying to be with. If a relationship gives us more reward and pleasure than cost and pain, we will like that relationship and wish it to continue. Thus, even after a relationship ends, we may find ourselves drawn to people that remind us of the former person.
This can help explain why no love can feel quite the same as that "first". These "firsts" can generate sensations so new and unfamiliar that the experience feels almost unreal. Besides emotional engagement, these experiences also have a heavy dose of novelty.

Mmmmm, don't even know where to start from. Firstly the picture or let me say architecture is perfect and concerning you having in your mind that you are an amateur in photography doesn't mean you couldn't take clearer and better pictures, all is good, I'd try an article on that. You are all good .