Steem Enhancement Suggestion: Posts Could Allow A "Minimum Comment Fee" In Order To Limit Spam
When posting, there are 3 options related to how a post manages payment: 50%/50% payment, decline payment, or 100% SP.
I suggest the introduction of a new option: "minimum comment fee". If author chooses that, then commenting will incur a minimum fee (0.1 STEEM?) or a custom one, as high as the author wants, set only for that post. If author chooses this option (which may be combined with any of the 3 above) then commenters won't be able to comment unless they pay that fee.
The comment fee may go to various places and, if this suggestion gets traction, I suggest a poll to crowdsource ideas. A few suggestions:
- comment fee goes to Steemit fund dedicated to the creation of new accounts (hence supporting the growth of the platform)
- comment fee goes to author 100% (as a form of tipping)
- comment fee is split between author and all commenters, on top of curation rewards
The rationale behind this suggestion is that many low-quality, irrelevant or spammy comments won't be posted at all, with a positive impact on the blockchain size and overall members experience.
The above text was posted identically, as an open issue, to the Steem GitHub repo.
If you want to contribute or debate, I would love to hear your ideas.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
This is a good point, since any limit on spam-type comments would be beneficial and refreshing.
At the same time, wouldn't it also be a good idea to limit those POSTS that are " low-quality, irrelevant or spammy"? From what I've seen during my 10 weeks on Steemit, it's more of a chore to work one's way through the constant streeeeeem of posts with trivial content than it is to read through any short comments.
Of course, limiting the posts might defeat the whole purpose / objective of Steemit. Quite possibly, we just have to learn to live with all those insignificant posts, and learn how to weed through them to find the quality posts.
That said, I do agree with your comment re the "impact on blockchain size." While it may not be seen as a serious issue now, it could became a major issue once Steemit grows a few thousand percent.
You can always curate your own authors feed, if you don't like them. It's not very difficult, you can just keep following the authors you like and unfollow the ones that you don't. It will create a "bubble", that's true, and when you'll get "out" in the wild, you'll always see the sea of meaningless stuff, but that's happening in any sort of social networking setup.
I believe you are very correct when you say "always see the sea of meaningless stuff."
I guess there's not much we can do about it, except to simply ignore it. Kinda like many things in our daily lives. :-)
I never go on 'New'.
I just keep as many followers as I can keep up with, and let them resteem new, interesting authors into my feed.
I see. Sticking to "New" is probably the best approach.
I'll most likely do that after a few months, but since I'm still relatively new, I'm going to keep searching through various feeds, searching for Steemians to follow and working to grow my community.
Then, I'll feel confident to screen out the "New."
Thanks for the input / advice.
p.s. Actually, over the past week, I have been going on NEW for only one reason. I go to the INTRODUCE YOURSELF stream and read which ever ones attract me. I've found some well-written intros by people who clearly have plenty to offer, and who will most likely produce quality content.
I give them a bit of advice and an upvote. And if the conversation with them seems to be substantive / interesting / worthwhile, I follow them.
I believe that's good for the future of Steemit, and hopefully for me too. :-)
Good piece of advice. Today I'm completing my first week here, and I've been reading and learning a lot about steemit. I'm mostly interested in blockchain technology and crypto, but can also enjoy about any good and constructive topic in general.
The way I use steemit, is by going only to the tags I want, like #gaming and #anime... yeah there's a lot of spam... But even new section is tolerable when you only choose the tag you want. (can't say that for all the tags though....)
Yeah, in one year I hardly remember going on "New", it's like drinking water from a hose. After a couple of months I also stopped visiting "Trending" too and stick with what I can manage.
I visit the new tab way more often than I visit the trending tab.
But when I want to discover new authors to follow and read from, I often "snoop" on other people's feeds and @majes.tytyty, I think you might actually like that little trick a lot.
When you are looking at somebody's profile you just add
/feedat the end of the url and suddenly you get a stream of fresh content that is curated by somebody that you respect or follow. You get direct access to their feed with posts from the people they follow.Here are two examples:
https://steemit.com/@dragosroua/feed
https://steemit.com/@mattclarke/feed
You broaden your steem horizons a bit without having to swim in the sea of meaningless stuff!
Great, thanks. I'll keep that in mind, and will soon give it a whirl.
As I commented on @majes.tytyty, I don't go to new section but the only in the tags I want... I think sticking to what you can manage is the best approach!!
If the other option is to limit the good posts? then I'd prefer to live with the insignificant posts.
How about, taking a fee from the author for every post they make after their second daily post? this will lessen spam... right?
A thoughtful and on its face practical sounding suggestion.
Although I've seen somewhat of a reduction in spam comments lately, I think your idea would help reduce them almost to non-existence.
Actually, the entire reward mechanism at Steemit needs an overhaul, but I don't have any original ideas at the moment. I'm glad to see that @mattclarke chimed in here, as I've also found his ideas appealing.
Steemit desperately needs some change to rewards that would encourage a change in the balance to a mass quantity of reader/curators supporting a smaller number of quality content creators.
😄😇😄
This sounds like Medium on steroids. Or on Steem.
I'm glad to have seen accounts that fearlessly flag spammers. It's a lot of hard work! Rightful flagging of spam must also be generously rewarded (after due investigation). - To me, it sounds complicated enough. On the other hand, having to pay, maybe 0.01 steem just for commenting wouldn't discourage me to post 'real' comments.
Glad to hear that :)
Now here is an awesome idea. Not only would it be awesome to see a lot of people paying to have their comments placed but it would rule out spamming comments for sure.
It would also give a little more reward to those that are authors and the people commenting and getting attention from all the followers now would have to pay something for it.
I would have to suggest this be something that the Author has complete control over and is able to use or not use to their discretion.
Also, the ability for the author to choose what happens to the "payment" would also be a great idea as it would be easy to add it as a "Tip" but also for the whale accounts maybe they would rather see the payments go to steem... or even possibly other steemians?
All in all I think it is a great idea and would love to see some type of implementation!
Great idea for sure, you got my gears grinding,
~ @Timbo
Yes, that's how I see it implemented, full control to the author.
Thanks for your support!
For sure, I would hate to see something like this not be implemented in the right way. It for sure has the ability to send shock waves through the community either good or bad.
Glad to be here to help out with supporting you.
I don't think I support this. If such feature becomes popular, it will severely limit the interaction that new users would be capable of. The small accounts will suffer alongside the spammers and I see that as counterproductive.
Additionally, I feel this goes against the free-speech ideals that are part of the essence of this platform. I really don't think authors should be able to make their posts into pay-to-speak areas.
I would rather keep seeing some spam comments than having such feature implemented.
'nice post'.
That kind of interaction?
All kinds of interaction. There is no practical way to systematically differentiate between the spam and the insightful comments that lead to meaningful engagement. I don't think we should deprive ourselves of the chance for the latter to limit the former. Spam is annoying, but not as annoying as a paywall, at least not to me.
He said that it would be optional.
You can do what you wanna do...
I noticed that, yes. Thus my "if this feature becomes popular" phrasing. In my opinion the idea has been presented clearly along with the reasoning for it. I'm just not in favor and wanted to make my opinion known. At least for now, I remain more or less convinced that such a feature goes against my idea of what this platform is and should be and the interests of the platform as a whole.
I like your suggestion because I also receive unrelated comments and spammy links. It also helps stop this form of reward-farming by 'just commenting'.
that's a very interesting term, never thought of this: reward-farming :)
'reward farming' is a big deal.
one account has thousands of sockpuppet accounts and thats what they do..then the comment-rewards are transferred to the mother account.
I like it.
I've previously suggested an option for the OP to set a minimum rep required to comment.
You're going to hear a lot of 'What about the people who don't have any SBD yet?', just like I hear 'What about the people who don't have a reputation yet?"
Objection handling is the same for both of our suggestions.
If you're new;
Thanks for the support, didn't know about your rep suggestion. The problem with rep is that it's a vanity metric (you can still post with low rep if you use the cli-wallet).
As for the mitigating the potential objections, yes, I agree with both.
There are still a few edge cases in which the comment fee can be abused, like, for instance, when someone posts an insult about somebody else and sets a ridiculously high comment fee, thus limiting the number of comments (or the possibility for the target to defend at all) making it seem legit. That's a form of extortion and I'm thinking at ways to mitigate this. Ideas?
Interesting. I wasn't aware of that cli-wallet workaround.
I just envisioned a warning above the 'reply' field.
We're a pretty smart bunch. If I post a furious rant or specific accusation about you, and set the requirement at anything but zero, I'm going to look like a bit of a putz.
You can always respond by downvoting the post, as I'm sure would many others.
That's true. Also funny :) And yes, downvoting is always available. I'm not resorting to it at all, by principle, but in some cases it may be a solution.
One big issue I can see with your suggestion would be that commenting would trigger the 'sign in' popup box, as it requires the Active Key, since it's spending from the wallet.
(Unless I'm missing something)
As things are right now, yes, it will trigger an active key popup, unless people are signed in with their master password.
Two thoughts.
Could it be set to apply only to steemians the author doesn't currently follow, perhaps even an automatic refund if the author likes the comment enough to follow the commenter?
That's another interesting idea. Thanks, will put it in the pile.
Good morning
Commenting is essential for newcomers, you can write amazing blogs but you need to interact to tempt folks in to taking a look.
While I agree It may reduce 'spammy' comments, i think there's also a risk that some users may have 'fear of commenting' - and really, we need comments and interaction to grow.
Of course we need comments and I agree about reluctance from newcomers. But as long as this is optional, each author will see how this works for himself and if it doesn't work, he can just stop using that option.
The question I think is why should there be time spent on developing something that is essentially speech-restrictive that might or might not work. If it works well, it will become popular and participating on the platform will become largely protected by a paywall. On the other had, if it doesn't work well and the feature remains unpopular, then the time and effort to develop it would have been kind of wasted. To me at least, the possible cons seem to clearly outweigh the possible pros.
Are you aware that even your own "participation" or your account here on Steemit is behind a paywall? There is a fee paid for every account creation transaction. It is paid by Steemit INC, but it may not be paid if accounts number increases too much.
My point is that everything has a cost. If we make the cost of commenting obvious, spam will naturally decrease. And STEEM, as a token, will get more economical value. An advertiser who wants to appear as a commenter on a post will just have to pay a fee.
It's in line with the whole "attention economy" that Steemit is based on.
I am aware of that but surely wasn't thinking about it. It's very easy to forget about a cost when somebody else is paying for it ;)
Still, I don't see this as sufficient justification for more fees.
The best option is to ignore the comments which doesn't make any sense as long as they don't spam with external links and for those we already have the option to flag comments, so i don't think implementing something like this is needed.
Posting fees should be imposed on the authors too.
Yeap, that could be feasible. I can see an on / off situation: posting for free and allowing only free comments, posting for a fee and allowing only paid comments.