Curation rewards are still broken
In The steemit curation nightmare: plagarism, spam bots, ghost profiles and cross-posting I listed some reasons why I think curation is difficult on steemit. That post was focused purely on the content side. In this post, I want to focus on the reward system.
The old curation system
Up until about four weeks ago, if you were the first to upvote a soon-to-be-popular post, the more reward you'd get. This results in bots being written that would automatically upvote a post almost instantly, an effect still being seen today.
The new curation system
@steemship wrote a detailed post explaining the new reward system, which penalises early voters. To summarise:
>Starting *TODAY all curation rewards earned by voting in the first 30 minutes after a post is made will be shared with the author. If you vote immediately after a post is made, then 99.94% of the curation reward will go to the author. If you vote after 15 minutes, then 50% will go to the author. Any votes made 30 minutes or later 100% will go to the curator. This only applies to the curation rewards. The author still gets at least 50% of the total rewards.
This is a big improvement on the old system, but it still has some potential issues.
The potential issues
There are three potential issues with this system:
- Bots can effectively block out all curation rewards by voting instantly. Although the bot doesn't benefit, neither does anyone else;
- Bots can help one another out. The author bot posts an article, the curator bot instantly upvotes it causing the author bot to get 99% of the curation reward.
- There are no rewards for downvoting, which plays just as important a role in curation as does upvoting
Hello, @jonblack
FIrst off, interesting concepts, your ideas are great! The quick breakdown of the new and old curation rewards was very helpful. I would like to chime in on Potential Issue #3.
I don't think at this time (or maybe even ever) should we be rewarded for downvoting anything. This is a site where your opinion is relevant and can earn you money by expressing such in the form of an Upvote, a positive way of expressing your like in something as well as paying for the curators time.
however, I feel the downvoting system is someone else's irrelevant opinion and shouldn't be granted money/Steem Power etc, ever. The downvoting system is only used by me when I find plagiarism, or photo shop crap, or BOTS. MAINLY BOTS. Or just someone being a complete tool (troll) All of which are definitely not worthy of a curation award by downvoting.
Of course this is just my opinion and I'd love to hear yours and the rest of the Steemit world's thoughts on this.
Thank you for the write.
Thanks for the kind words.
I was wondering whether I should add issue #3.
Steemit relies heavily on incentives to function. Since upvoting is the only curator incentive, there will be a bias toward that behaviour. Punishment can only happen after posts or comments have been downvoted, but because of the bias toward upvoting, posts that should be downvoten aren't; in fact, the opposite happens.
I personally wouldn't call downvoting negative. Like upvoting it can be abused and be negative in context, but downvoting a very clearly plagarised content is in my opinion positive behaviour, and should be rewarded just as much as upvoting good content.
On a personal level, when I flag something, I want to see a positive result of that. bison015 is still commenting very quickly on posts and many Steemers are downvoting, but the user is still there, and still commenting immediately on posts. It's not completely black and white, and I'm glad to see the addition of a "Mute" button, but it seems odd that a person who's spoiling the party is still allowed to attend.
I understand your hesitance with rewarding downvoting. It could open up a whole other can of warms (think: a lot of posts with negative values). I still think there is value in it, but you're right to be cautious.
Perhaps we could look at the downvote system as a courtesy we all provide (at no cost) that is used to the communities advantage?
By utilizing it we could help filter out bad, unprofessionally written and non proofread articles that are just junk posts seeking payouts. Pushing the more interesting and wanted to see articles up.
We could use it to locate bots and terminate them. locate plagiarized articles, and all other forms of things that the downvote system should OR shouldn't be used for. Again that's why I like to think of it as an irrelevant vote that still carries some precedence to the community as a whole.
As you said each system can be abused, but this one can be the one outlet we all can utilize that doesn't pay out curation rewards and carries no other motive to get you to use it other than to maintain a cleaner & more professional Steemit experience for all. #crypt0 #truecrypto #craigrant
I think there are people here that do this. There are also a large number that don't purely because of the incentive associated with upvoting.
Perhaps this is what you want, but the message being sent is: upvoting is more important to steemit than downvoting. This seems also the case from a usability perspective: upvoting is at the end of a post and clearly associated with its incentive; downvoting is at the top right and looks like a flag.
I hope I don't sound too insensitive. I'm not sure that rewarding downvoting is the answer, but the current situation doesn't fill me with confidence that we'll achieve what we want: that quality content is made visible to Steemers and that plagarised, fake, and otherwise poor content is not.
Also with the volume of posts that go through the system a large number of articles are likely to get lost if people are waiting 15min. to vote
If anything these changes actually make it easier for bots to work and get more money.
I could just create one that votes on every post at 31 minutes - it's easy. This will just penalise regular people.
Bots should be dealt with more directly. One initial step would be giving instant bans for their use (at least for voting).
That's what I was hoping downvoting all these bots would help do, seperate them from humans and take whatever steps necessary to remove the profile and hopefully get some control over the issue.
Steemit is still beta. I consider it to be a system in constantly beta, where the rewards are adjusted to bring the best results. In some tasks bots are very helpful. In others bots should be excluded. I lke the cheetah bot. Its really helpful. Bots that were only created to grabbing rewards should be banned. (Hopefully Ned or Dan are reading this)
I think you are misunderstanding something about the new curation system. When an account votes for a post that is brand new, they donate 100% of their curation reward to the author. Not total curation reward.
So if it's a tiny account, not much is lost to later curators who wait. The curation order system considers weight, so a bunch of minnow accounts voting before a moderate stake account won't make a huge difference.
So the 99% that's given to the author is 99% from the curators own curation award, not the total curation award. If the curator waits 15 minutes, then 50% of the curators curation award goes to the author? Have I got that right?
Correct. The curation author donation is not by post, it's by individual account and vote time.
What do you think about this ?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@fogspam/things-that-steemit-should-implement-to-eliminate-multiple-accounts-bots-upvoting-groups-garbage-posts-etc
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