Steemit - Rise of the Autovote? An Autovote Majority?
I made a post this morning. And it had under 20 votes after 30 minutes, and under $1 payout. What was going on?
As I checked other posts, there weren't very many made this morning. Those that were made, had low upvote counts as well.
What is really going on?
Many people use autovoting technology, like bots to vote on the same authors, or other sites to autovote based on criteria, like following the votes of others. One site that does this is streemian, which is down.
The saying is a play on "rise of the planet of the apes", where the autobots and autvotes are taking over instead of the apes :P
When streemian goes down it shows that 2/3 of people use autovoting and vote-trail following for their voting behavior.
Is that disturbing to you? That a large majority of the votes come not from people who upvote your content becaues they like it, but because they autovote it or follow others who might upvote it.
Do you think it's disturbing to people who might be thinking of investing in a so-called "social media platform"? Why are people going to invest in a "social media platform" that has over 1/2 of it's content not even evaluated by people? Is this what a "social media platform" is, where content isn't being evaluated or appreciated by the people/voters in order to rank how popular or desirable it is?
This makes content popularity not even really based on the upvotes received. Only a 1/3 proportion of upvoters are possibly voting for posts willingly because of the content, not with autobots, autovoting authors or following vote trails.
When looking for content, such as popular content, one would think that people would actually like the content in order for it to become popular. But that isn't the case on Steemit. The votes allocated to posts aren't coming from a majority of people who like the post, appreciate it, value it, etc. It seems the majority of votes are from autovoting and trail following.
Plus many votes, manual or autovoted, are for curation rewards too, again not even about the content being good, valued or appreciated by the person voting.
What do you think about all of this?
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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It seems that no one has the time for reading posts - some might be "speed reading" articles but the vast majority are not even doing that.
This is the era of instant gratification and the rise of the bots is a reality already. Even people who read posts(the tiny few) may be using bots for upvoting - simply because they may not have the time to read all that they may want to and then upvote.
The thing is - there is a huge, mammoth amount of content being published every day, every hour, that it is impossible to go through even a small percentage of it. Hence the rise of the autovote, as you put it.
Hence this result, as most people rely on bots to do their voting.
Yep. I'm having to shorten my articles to the point where they barely have content to try and get anyone to read them. The ADD online is getting out of control.
I figure you have 4 sentences and a picture, if you are lucky, to hook someone.
We need more posts on fidget spinners!
Indeed. It's been like this for a while. I've always found it largely makes a mockery of pretending to be "social media" as a result when most of the upvotes don't come from actually evaluating content.
Sadly so...
Most people still read content and don't have the time to comment, they just upvote and move on.... Its all in one blender...
This is why I value thoughtful comments more than upvotes. Don't get me wrong, I love the upvote (automatic or otherwise) because getting paid for the work I do is a strong motivator to keep working!
A thoughtful comment WITH the upvote tells me you valued my content enough to read it, say something about it, and maybe even tell others about it.
Auto-upvotes or not, keep writing engaging posts and you will encourage more people to engage with them and give you more "human" upvotes!
Thanks for the feedback. The point was more about how much of a real audience we have, as the problem. When the autovote tools go down, then you really see how many people are actually voting within those first 30 minutes lol. It seems that 2/3 of those first 30 minutes of support come from tools that vote for you. This wasn't about how I'm "not getting enough upvotes", "not enough money", etc. ;)
Yeah ... that is disparaging ... my first $4 comes from auto-voters. So my last post hasn't even made $1 with whatever trail was following me being down :(
Well it could be the first post was ppl seeing your posts in a tag, and other posts they don't, or they don't interest them. How do you know it was bots or a trail?
Because when the trail is down, I make $0.11 and when it's up I instantly make $5
I suggest that payouts are based on the total value of comments more than the amount of votes on the content. This way auto-votes have less or no impact on payouts and thus there is no incentive to use them. It could be that votes on posts determine visibility and ranking, but votes on comments determine post payout.
Let the value of the social interaction determine the value, not the cold calculations of bots.
Thanks again @krnel
Upvoted by a human and re-steemed!
Unfortunately that system would be unfair to authors, unless you mean curation rewards should come from comment upvotes ...
Automated non-human voting that works to maximize curation rewards is something to be expected keeping in mind how steem has been set up. I personally see it as more of a weakness and a door wide open for abuse, spam and a certain type of investors reaping rewards without providing value back to the community.
It's a free market and people are warranted to be looking out for their own interests and to exploit opportunities, but this situation and the severity of the practice keeping in mind what you have reported, are certainly not an asset for the platform and its premise as a social network. Bots redistributing the reward pool in this way is by no means a very social way of handling things.
Well said :) You're like Mr. Eloquent. Good communication from you always hehe.
Hehe :P Thanks! :) I do have a bit of tendency for word diarrhea sometimes, I hope you do find it tolerable :P
This is and will be an issue. This is and will be an issue in the future and needs to be looked at. This is part of the reason I wrote the post about the manual curators throwing quality into the whale pool as it may stimulate some big players to manually vote on what they wouldn't normally or at least vote on quality.
I understand that busy people can't only manually vote every time and the whale votes should be utilised and spread to what lifts the site reputation and gives long-term depth.
I tested streemian for two weeks as an experiment. I felt very awkward seeing my vote on posts i both didn't read and when i did, wouldn't have voted it up.
Side note: steemnow and steemviz are not connecting to the chain either it seems.what is going on?
Interesting and honest reflection about what occurred. Just goes to show...
Various sites use the default steem RPC node, and it had issues today it seems.
It is frustrating. Personally, I am struggling with feeling like the only ones reading anything are small accounts still trying to "make it".
When I know how many "base" votes I am going to get on any given post, it takes some of the enjoyment out of it.
Meanwhile, the trending page... blah will not even bother to say it.
I am hoping people who care about the future of the platform will begin to support those who are actually reading, commenting and using the platform. This is part of the reason I have been annoyed with the focus on comment votes. Seriously, let's reward those who provide POR. (proof of reading)
I know what you mean. It seems only a few small, well-meaning content creators are active and the rest is on auto-pilot. It's not hard to see why, after being here for a few months and treating it like a 60-hour-a-week job curating, commenting replying...it's hard work. And often thankless or outright retributive.
Slogging through the new section and all the porn reposts is like a tour of duty.
Yes, 3/4 of the comments I get are from newer accounts from the past few months, and very few old accounts.
I don't loo ;) No idea what's going on there, but I suspect more of the same types of stuff as last year.
Multiple problems can be addressed, self-voting is an issue. If a comment is valued by others they should learn to upvote it, even if it's only 1%. It's because of the monetary focus that acts as the primary motivator from curation. Posts get you money back, but comments don't much because no one else is voting them up either. Or do comments not have curation at all? lol People are drawn to the activities that can get them the most rewards. New people tend to comments more than post, as to have more exposure from saying something on many post with more views, than just their own unknown posts.
I like to just keep an eye on the new section, lots of stuff to sift through but it feels good bringing up a good post that was at 0.00 even if its just a meager $0.10 vote from me.
I find comments almost never get noticed or upvoted so I dont bother putting much time into commenting anymore.
I also like to sift through the mass comments on popular posts and upvote the good ones to move them to the top (rather than upvoting the post, since it is already doing well)
I love the new section also!
POR - I like that. It's the real appreciation - that adds value to one's post.
Exactly and if we want "Real People" using the site, the way to do that is to reward those who are using the site. lol
I call it quality - followship. Rather have 100 of those than 10,000 of crowd that doesn't appreciate/or engage.
I like that, "proof of reading." I spend more time on Steemit enjoying other people's work than putting up my own. But I don't always want to comment.
This is a great post. As a newb to Steemit, I genuinely had no idea this was a thing. I knew bots existed but if am honest even bots have their place. But this autvoting is a monstrosity.
What's next autoposting??
Is Steemit going to devolve in to a social platform for bots, autovoting programs and no humans in sight?? I really hope that autovoting is removed otherwise the heart will be completely ripped out of Steemit and this is one of the last bastions left that has some heart.
Hehe, I feel ya, but the bots can't be removed since the blockchain is open for anyone to interact with, without a site needed.
I vote for your post because I like it. And I don't use bots. There are still people who make curation manually😉 Yes, it is not so profitable, but much more interesting...
Hip-hip-hooray for doing all your actions yourself, like it should be :D We are few and far between lol.
Comments mean more , when you interact with one another , you get to know the person better and their material , when you just upvote to a return in favor , it doesn't mean anything . Honestly that's greedy , when someone can make a useful comment and engage in a conversation, that's what's worth it
Yes, comments add value with information of relevance. But that was not the purpose of the post. It's about how your real audience isn't even representative by the upvotes we get. Most of that is just upvotes from automated tools, where people aren't even aware of the content or what it';s about to even judge if they like it or not :P When these tools go down, you really see who the real people supporters are, and how that differs from the normal automation of votes you get. It just shows how unreal the evaluations of content are. Only about 1/3 of the upvotes are really being done from people who evaluate the actual content. At least from the first 30 minutes anyways. If you take the whole post time into consideration, it's probably less, 1/4 or less?
I wish some posts were valued more then what they receive , so many good content that is unnoticed :/
What do you mean streemian is down? I'm following steemSTEM's trail with it and it's working fine. Or do you mean it occasionally goes down?
The general question is nuanced. If everyone had a substantial upvote, like say a dollar, 20 people voting on my post would make me happy. As it is, 20 people voting on my post gives me 20-40 cents (unless you're one of them! :P ). That means these small fish - these minnows - group together and upvote automatically in order to rise in SP. They look for ways to trick the system, in other words.
When we made @SteemDeepThink, we decided to use autovoting in order to promote authors, rather than content. So if we judge an author's content to be good, we vote him in, and automatically upvote his posts. We each read some of these posts, and if the quality drops, we reevaluate our vote (every new member can vote). The goal is to help the author rise in SP so that his vote will be worth something, giving him our votes when it matters, simultaneously, which might land in him in 'hot' territory. There are authors that I know will post good content without fail, and so I upvote some of these authors automatically, and then hope I'll read some or most of their stuff when I have time. Your posts have a certain consistency in their quality, and many of them are good earners, so I'm not surprised you're an auto-voting target! It's easy to be cynical and think they're after the curation reward, but I think many of the auto-voters might actually enjoy your content.
It was down when I originally made the note or early post.
Yes, true, many auto-voting is done because of trust in the authors content. But I'm more picking on the principle of autovoting, and how it undermines the principle of evaluating and valuing content to give it an upvote. Bots aren't going anywhere. I'm just pointing out how it looks to the outside when people notice this. Social media where a large part of the activity is automatically generated :P hehe.
I am very concerned about this actually. I don't think boting is generally a bad thing. If you think there is a User who is always writing undervalued posts it is OK to push him with auto-votes.
However I also don't use @randomwhale and @booster , because I believe this is not how the Steemit upvotes should work. An upvote should always mean "I like that content".
What is your opinion on payed-for votes @krnel? Is there something I do not see that explains why so many use the service? Many among them that I hold dear and that I would not unfollow because of it, btw.
Indeed. Upvotes are supposed to be a refection of an evaluation of the content that someone gives someone else. Buying upvotes from people is not an evaluation of the content. It betrays the purpose of votes to evaluate media and give rise to popularity of content.
Here's a positive use case for buying votes from bots like @booster.
Once every two weeks I create a newspaper-like post in which I choose a few posts that I liked the most from the previous two weeks. I set the rewards payout for that post at 1% for me and 99% for the authors that I choose to feature in that post. In that way I try to 'artificially' extend the reward payout for those posts so that authors can earn a little bit more.
For the last two such posts I created, I bought a few upvotes from @booster, @discordia or @worldclassplayer in order to increase the author reward for those two posts so that the authors featured in those two posts will be awarded a little more beyond the upvotes that are naturally received from normal Steemians and beyond my upvote which is worth only 3 cents.
You can check the posts here and here.