Threat to the current curation rewards system
The whole curation rewards system on paper is great. Getting compensated for spending your valuable time reading and judging an article is an amazing concept. But I have a strong feeling that more and more people seem to be on Steemit just to get the curation rewards. Which technically would also be fine was it not for a few things. Maybe you can already see the first issue in the image below.
All four articles, of which I displayed the bar you will find at the end of each article, where 'Trending Articles'. These are basically the highest paid articles which have been posted in the last few days. In all these four articles you can notice that the amount of (up-)votes is higher then the amount of views (277 vs 112, 460 vs 219, 401 vs 185 and 620 vs 205). This means that around 60-70% of the people that up-voted any of these four articles didn't even open the article. It's obvious that without opening the article (a view) you cant read it and therefore the actual value of the article can't be judged. However, the system does allow you to do so and will reward you for it. Please note that I specifically searched for 4 articles where this was the case and although it took less then a minute, there are plenty of articles that have more views then up-votes.
As an author that just posted something it's nice that people massively up-vote your post and the amount of money that the authors will make on these articles shown is amazing so I don't think they would complain, I wouldn't. However, valuable information is corrupted as possibly only 100 people actually read it and from those 100 people only 2 actually up-voted the article. The other 275 up-votes might just come from people that follow high-earning authors and up-vote any post they post.
Proof for this can be found if you start following some of the authors that post trending articles. Within one minute of posting they will already have had 20 up-votes whilst the article might be a few pages long.
I therefore suggest people actually need to open the article and scroll down before they can up-vote it. You could possibly also block the up-voting option for the first few minutes. Let me know what you guys think!
my proposal would be, hiding the upvote-button until you open the post.
and additionally, everybody should be able to adjust their voting power.
Yes hiding the upvote button so people would have to open the article and scroll down in order to upvote would be good.
This post received a 2.3% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @locos! For more information, click here!
Some people just want to upvote articles at whim. With the hard fork you have to be careful as a lot of upvoting will run down your voting power.
Yes exactly. Guess not everyone is aware of that yet.
Thank you so much for re-steeming it! First time someone re-steemed my post!
I resteemed this and it should be looked at. And it's what I posted also about people just upvoting and not even reading the article.
Thank you for resteeming it! Much appreciated!
I think that this could be a future issue. A discussion no doubt needs to be held at some point and no doubt it has been held by devs. Right now it's more of an incentive than a flaw, time will no doubt change the way things operate.
Totally agree, Steemit is still at its early stages and like you said I'm pretty sure the developers will sort it out if it's a real issue. Thank you for your comment.
Curation trails set up at Streemian and also bots can do this as well.. Some people might not have time to read through the articles - so they trail someone who does have time to read. With Streemian, your vote automatically follows your "leader"..
Thank you for that information, but don't you think that is a flawed system and such things will damage Steemit on the long run as articles aren't really being curated.
Articles on Facebook aren't being curated either, and they seem to be doing ok.
The new hardfork is going to change the payouts in a pretty significant way. There will still be a lot going to the top, but there will be a lot more being spread out further. THis will be an opportunity for us all to do a bit better.
We have to remember that this is also a social media site, the most popular will always be making more than the newbies.. So how do you get more followers? Comment on others posts. Comment, comment, comment... THis way, people will start to recognize your name. Build from there..
Articles on Facebook can be liked or judged in all kind of ways now, which is a way of curating. Even if you don't think that isn't the case: Facebook is a different concept where it isn't as important as on Steemit. Facebook wouldn't be worth what it is today if you could like posts or pages without viewing them. Besides that I always think its a silly aargument to say that someone is also not doing it or someone doesn't have it and they are still successful. Steemit has this concept of curation awards, there is a reason for curation awards and we should all strive to make it the best it can be.
Thanks for your reply and hopefully posting will also gain me followers so more people can be part of discussions like this and share their thoughts!
It should be noted that the view count only counts those landing on the post from within the Steemit UI, there are also other UI that interface with the Steem Blockchain too (Busy.org, eSteem) Also the viewer count may be lower as it also doesn't count views coming from Facebook,Twitter or Instagram either, as I understand, I may be wrong.
I do agree that many votes occur in a timeframe that would make it impossible to have actually read the post first.
Ok I will need to look in to that but if you are not a member (coming from Facebook, Twitter or Instagram) you can not upvote the post. So it would still mean that more Steemians upvoted the post then Steemians that actually viewed it.
nice .....what about money making
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We should certainly hide the voting on your feed and require you to open the article.
Yes, i don't see any reason why not too.
I totally agree with you. Most people are only busy with upvoting and not reading the content of the article.
I also see that after 30 minutes nobody is interested in the article anymore as the number of votes drops to zero. My posts are probably not interesting enough😀
To make a button for upvoting only after the post is read is the best solution I think. I sure hope that in the next version this will be introduced.
The fact that we receive an incentive for upvoting is wonderful whith steem but it is also the "Achilles heel" and therefore a treath for the platform as people are only busy gaining and making money out of it. I do not think that is the main purpose of the platform.
And I totally agree with you. I would like to add that some people are just pushing posts out there of which many are plagiarized. Fake news in regards to the Status ICO was even upvoted more times then my article about it lol.
However, I believe that like Wikipedia there can be a community that manages itself with some trusted curators that can block upvoting on an article and possibly even change or remove an article. Removing an article might sound drastic but at times I have seen the same article, copied from another website, being posted by multiple people.