My SteemIt policy (responsibilities, guidelines, etiquette, abuse)
I have put together an overview with all 3 roles and what i think is reasonable etiquette and are reasonable guidelines. Hopefully this article will also give you a better idea of what the goal is for each role is and the best practices to make this platform grow to it's full potential.
DISCLAIMER: This is a rough draft, it's not the final version.
My policy
On SteemIt every action you take has a direct effect on the perceived value of the platform and therefore an indirect effect on the price of STEEM. You can be a content creator, a curator, an investor and any combination of the 3 in the same account. Let's go over what the responsibilities, expectations and guidelines are for each role.
1. Content creators
A content creator is someone who publishes posts, comments or both at least once a month. As a content creator you have the responsibility to create the highest possible quality content. The database is permanent, so make sure your content is worth using up database space. Any content that is below average could be considered spam, which makes the database needlessly large and all content harder to find. So make sure your content is good enough before publishing it.
General
- You are allowed to posts as many times a day as you want (and the network allows)
- You are allowed to 100% upvote all your posts and comments, although it's highly preferred to let others curate your content!
- Plagiarism, spam and fraud will not be tolerated so don't waste your time on it
2. Curators
A curator is someone who upvotes and downvotes (flags) content. As a curator you are expected to keep the value of the platform high by upvoting content that you think deserves more rewards and downvote content that you think deserves less rewards.
When you upvote content, you are using your share of the reward pool on 1 user. When you downvote, you remove rewards from 1 person and put it back into the reward pool for everyone to use again. The more STEEM POWER you have, the more responsibility you have when taking action. When using your full power as a large stake holder, you have to be absolutely sure your action is justified.
Upvoting
- Specifically searching for under-rewarded content is highly appreciated!
- On average you should strive for using at least 90% of your power on posts*
- On average you should strive for using at most 10% of your power on comments (that includes your own comments)*
- Consistently assigning more than 10% of your total rewards on average to your own comments could be considered spam and could result in loss of some or all rewards and reputation*
* The numbers provided are averages over a long period of time. Individual votes can be far away from your target average.
Downvoting
- You are expected to downvote all content that is over-rewarded as fast as possible (this includes cases like plagiarism, spam, fraud, below average quality content and above average quality content that is over-rewarded)
- It's highly recommended to leave a comment with your explanation for downvoting
- Downvoting will not earn you curation rewards, but will reward you by the preservation of the quality of the platform
3. Investors
An investor is someone that either invests time or money into the platform. When you invested in STEEM with "real" money, you are likely to be highly motivated and want to do everything within your power to increase the perceived value of a STEEM token. Below are the most common positive and negative effects on the future price of STEEM.
Positive:
- Actively promoting SteemIt
- Creating websites & apps
- Release quality content for people to enjoy (if your main goal isn't to make money with content creation, don't upvote your own content)
- Use your power to reward content creators appropriately
- Use your power to moderate the network
Negative:
- Lowering the payout of all content creators by removing rewards from the reward pool and placing them on yourself
Don't forget to follow, resteem and browse my channel for more information!
Well intentioned. But I have issues with some sections.
Which central authority decided 10% was the right amount of rewards that should go to your own content? Why is 10% the right number as opposed to zero or 50%?
How exactly would you propose to "not tolerate" this behavior and achieve loss of rewards?
Not sure the proposal for flagging/downvoting is well thought out. Sounds kind of like an ivory tower idea. In practice I'm sure it would result in a lot of tit for tat nastiness, that certainly isn't useful for the platform. I can see in practice that would just devolve into a Yahoo type forum, where there is a roughly equal upvoting and downvoting; but the quality of commentary on yahoo posts is zero. The situation devolves into name calling. Why would we want to replicate that on steemit?
There is a different way to look at upvotes you don't agree with - people are just different. Their upvoting something I personally don't like isn't WRONG, its just different and I don't think it is right to downvote for being different.
If you want a set of etiquette rules that represent good policy, you are going to have to put in something about bots.
What about the bots that just upvote the list of "currently popular" bloggers, since it is known their posts always go to the moon. Is that good practice?
What about the bots where you delegate some SP to them, so they can make sure your voting power is always fully used and they apply to the posts most likely to make the biggest pay outs, as opposed to the posts that they spent even 3 seconds reading and felt were worthwhile. Is that good practice?
"Use your power to reward content creators appropriately" WTF does that mean? Who decides what is appropriate?
I believe you are well intentioned.
But I wonder if the focus on "here are all the rules from HQ" isn't motivated by lack of confidence that a decentralized system will produce good results without control mechanisms from HQ keeping everything under tight control?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
Check it out.
Nowhere does it say only 10% of the rewards should go to yourself. It says that i think 10% of your rewards should go to comments as a guideline, but when 100% of your rewards you assign to comments go to yourself, then it's problematic.
Bots are programmed by people and should just be curated the same way. I could include that bots are allowed but should serve a positive purpose though.
You, me and others do ;)
Everything in this article is my personal opinion and should be treated as such. At this moment there's no intention to make this a prominent guide or policy whatsoever.
EDIT: I edited the part about self-voting comments too much.
Ok, this is real advice. Sometimes I blame myself for not searching for this kind of info before starting posting and upvoting myself and my comments everytime. I use to get upvote and replies for the things I create and post by many people who dont even follow me when I start in my first week. Now my post dont do well because I always upvote myself and my comments. I am very happy to have this advice and henceforth I have stop and will spend more time to create before I post, not for earning money but for the people on @steemit to benefit. Thanks for posting this info, I am gonna resteem for more newbies to notice it.
It would be so much easier to love steemit if there where mostly "the highest possible quality content." :) Upvoted of course. Regards!
Downvoting is a difficult Area. I understood you should only downvote plagiarism or abuse etc, not poor quality posts. There is plenty of stuff that would be down votes if you downvote poor quality but what is the incentive? There are no monetary rewards for downvote and as many of these types of posts have a 'fan club' you are opening yourself up to abuse. I've seen individuals reduced to negative reputation because they have posted negative comments in particular comment threads. It's just not worth it. If you expect the downvote feature to work it needs to be looked at.
Yup people are scared (and greedy to lose out on curation rewards), but if more people start doing what's right, there will be less resistance/revenge since it will be pointless when 10's of thousands of people curate the content.
I also agree that the current implementation of flagging is terrible. You lose rewards, the author loses reputation and 1 whale can destroy someone. A lot of improvements are needed indeed!
Still as a newbie, I found this very helpful. Definitely a post worth of upvote.
Seems like good guidlines for everyone to follow. Appreciate your sharing.
Follow me..
And..
please upvote my essay..
😊😊
I am a bit hesitant to downvote. Won't that trigger 'downvote back' by affected users as a form of tit for tat? And how much influence would my downvote have as minnow?
People need to stop being scared of flagging. It's a very good way to make the network better. Your downvote specifically would be as effective as your upvote, very small, but it's the priciple that counts :)
Your choice to down vote actually reflects more on you than it does on the person you are down voting. If you use it irresponsibly, that is, simply because you don't like the opinion expressed in the post, it does not mean that the person you have down voted will also use it irresponsibly - that is, retaliate. Down voting should never be used as described in the article above - which is basically as a way of silencing views that you don't feel 'fit in'. And, no, I have not down voted the post, because I refuse to use a down vote except to flag child porn or animal cruelty - that is the purpose of a down vote.
Another good post for how to utilize and behave on Steemit! Thank you for insight and opinion. I will be more conscious on how I vote .
Three questions: 1) What's the best way to search for under-appreciated content; 2) How do I change the percentage of power applied to upvotes; and 3) Does upvoting take money/power/whatever from my account and give it to the person I'm upvoting or from somewhere else in the system? Thanks.
Visiting https://steemd.com could probably get you some more information you need. But it's very complicated.
Thank you for the quick reply! I'll check those out.