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RE: Proposing Steem Equality 0.19.0 as the Next Fork
There is a reason that was added in the first place. Do you have a solution to the problem it is solving?
There is a reason that was added in the first place. Do you have a solution to the problem it is solving?
The reason was to prevent bots from getting all the curation rewards by voting in the first few seconds. However, 30 minutes is extreme. A much shorter period would suffice to limit instant voting by bots without being so intrusive to regular users.
And if we would remove the vote order weight? We can remove the whole 30 minutes then when I understand the reasons correctly. I believe from reading through all sort of posts and the whitepaper the vote order weight was introduced to give extra reward to those who are very active in curating. But don't you think that only a small percentage may be very active, and all the others simply do not have the time to be that active? Could it be that when we have let say 1 million active users, most of them spend some quality time on Steemit creating a post, reading some posts, writing some comments, and casting some votes on whatever they like when reading, and then go and do other things? Steemit has build in a game element by implementing the vote order weight; A pure reward game for a few individuals to try and maximise their curation rewards; The vote order weight does not serve anything else, or is at least not that important to get eg quality content voted for IMHO. The whole service needs to be as simple as it can get for growth. Most of us are not beta people, most of us are creative people, writers, artists etc. In the future maybe Steemit likes to add businesses, from SME's to large enterprises; anything complex, they will not like at all, not the independent grocery store around the corner, not Coca Cola or PPG. Maybe I do not see all ins-and-outs and pro's and con's, but to me, the reverse auction is making things too complex. The vote order weights is making things to complex. The non linear voting curves are too complex. The later is topic of change; What about the other ones?
I think the vote order weight should be a lot smaller. Some bonus for being first is okay, but there's no reason later voters can't get a meaningful share as well.
It's hard to find an Unloved post but it's easy to vote for all the hot and trending posts. I think we should keep some reward.
I agree with @dennygalindo
The system (Steemit UI) shall allow simple discovery of interesting content and more fine grained ways of promoting content. The system (Steemit UI) shall allow for creation of groups / sub-communities, creation of customisable channels (eg all subjects with xyz in my home channel, eg post text contains xyz in my home channel, tag xyz in my home channel). This will create an environment where the Unloved posts will not be so Unloved anymore. With the UI so much can be done, and we do so little with it. We leave everything for others to build, for bots to run with all the negative side effects. It shall all be within the Steemit UI.
What would be your proposal for weight curve?
It is a complicated problem and one where I haven't had time to actually sit down and try to write equations but as a conceptual framework I think earlier voters should gets some sort of "finder's fee" that based on the value from later voters, but is not the predominant portion. So maybe something in the neighborhood of 10-20% of rewards from later votes would flow to earlier votes. That could still be a very large return to the earliest voters but would be less extreme in its effect on later voters (who now get little to nothing).
Somehow it makes indeed sense to give the early voters some more rewards. But I still think this is only for a very few who really start seeking for the 'best' posts (with 'best'I mean posts that are expected to get a lot of followon votes which are not necessary the best posts). Also, it may result in those early voters to vote for the posts that are usually in trending page (Steemit Inc / Steem App / Crypto posts). Others may just by luck vote for a post that eventually get a lot of follow-on voters, so once in a while they benefit from the finders fee. Why do I think the Finders Fee is it is only for a few of us? Because this requires a lot of work, reading a lot of posts, or analysing the voting behaviour in good details! Also spread over the day, so these people need to return to Steemit various times a day. Most of us will never do that, Steemit Inc is simply not the most important service we have to take care of to earn our money to pay for our bills, and most of us also have some together things to do in life. Therefore the Finders Fee becomes a game element, and I'm really wondering why a Social Media service requires a game element. Bots will become better and better, taking more data in (maybe the whole blockchain) and start to do more indepth analyses. I therefore suspect that the game, the search for the content that gets a lot of votes and get the Finder Fee will be received mainly by bots. Votes will be casts to posts based on all sort of parameters, but not directly the quality of the post itself, but more on vote behaviour on writers, voting groups (who vote for who mostly), trending page analyses, time of day, maybe elements in the post itself (references included, images included, post with minimum amount of characters included and so on). So, yes Finder Fee may seem a nice idea, but in the end it makes Steemit a game and will reward in general bots and gamers; both have nothing to do with the creativity to create good posts/comments and value good post/comments.
Being received by bots, assuming those bots are doing a good job, does not bother me.
The people developing those bots that are taking in more data and doing in-depth analysis are doing valuable work. It is reasonable they get a return on that investment.
Remember, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have curation. The develop algorithms (aka bots) to do much of it, and have people involved at some level too. And they spend a lot of money on that effort, with goal, to some extent, of presenting fresh and relevant information to their users (also an element of maximizing ad revenue, but that wont work without keeping the service useful and the users coming back)! If they can spend money on it, we can too.
Indeed, IF bots are doing a good job. But reality is that Bots cannot determine quality of the textual part of the post and even the media part of the post other than check if different elements are part of the post, text is a certain length and so on. Maybe IBM and others can do a bit more with there AI, but Steemit bots are far from that intelligent. Therefore, vote bots are to me just to game the system and does not help the quality level of Steemit, and for that purpose the Finder Fee shall not be kept.
Monetisation of work to better analyse Steemit can be done in other ways. Some of the auto voters ask for a fee to the user, that is monetisation in a different way, the Finder Fee shall not be created/kept just to give some monetisation directly from the heart of the system to the Bot owner. BTW, Steemit Inc owns a whole lot of millions in Steem and since they are the owner of the software, and they have such a pile of money, they should spend some of to fund external development, since this type of features shall actually be part of what Steemit is delivering! Outsourcing means, paying the outsourced parties. The Finder Fee is paid for by us the bloggers and users of the platform, while we are not using them. Actually we are funding bots that will 'steal' our potential revenues. Giving direct revenues will actually pushes more engineers to create bots and in the end we have a social network dominated by bots, and some human gamers. I'm really afraid, Steemit will never grow when bots are the dominant factor, and when gamers are taken the revenues. It will also prevent non crypto brands to start using Steemit as a communication channel.
And I can assure you, when we can start onboarding brands using Steemit as another communication channel, this will be fantastic for Steem as a currency. I have some solid ideas what segments of the market I could bring to Steemit. And I can tell you as well; When Steemit is not the right service to bring them, a new one can be created by just another company and Steemit and Steem will be out of the game at all. This is not a threat whatsoever, but just a simple observation from my side looking at the enormous revenue opportunities out there with businesses and I'm looking to startup new companies as well, as I look at Steemit as an interesting concept that may work to actually make a commercial business with (eg working with Steemit Inc directly) or along with it (create a new UI like Busy.org on the Steem blockchain), or just simply start a whole new enterprise and currency. But Steemit and Steem is too complex to bring those companies and therefore revenues onboard; Also some good technical development needs to be done, to the backend but also to the frontend and possible also to the API to integrate the technical systems of the businesses with Steemit/Steem.
Long story short, revenues to 3rd party services must be done in a cleaver way, better to seek them external from Steem, then to collect them directly from Steem/Steemit. Onboarding many users and keep them active as well as onboarding businesses requires simplicity of everything, from technology to revenue generation/distribution. I personally have more than 20 years experience (product management/pre-sales/solution-architect roles) in high end IT and Telco solutions (order sizes of millions) in the software space, so I know what I'm talking about.
Also (but off topic here), the balance in power is too much to some individuals; The constant fights and wars her on Steemit is not good is not professional enough for businesses to want to become part of Steemit. The lack of vision, strategy by Steemit Inc is making this at this stage not the right platform to onboard big revenues. To bring businesses, decentralisation of ideas and engineering work incl interfaces does not work, companies want to work with central organisations. This could be Steemit Inc, or another company like Busy.org, or just a new company working with Steem blockchain....or maybe then better to establish a new currency in the market and create a new Social Media service implementing the right vision, strategy, execution, from business perspective, from technology perspective, from power distribution perspective, and from revenue distribution perspective.
Ow BTW, we all hate Facebook and Twitter and those right? I opt for a different approach, more power to the people to discover, less general channels like hot and trending for all posts, better tools to the writers to promote their posts (inside and outside Steemit), much better UI to the users and future businesses. No, and absolutely NO vote bots, only features to analyses the data, but that is not a bot in my language, that is called an analyses tool and reporting module! Reporting can be created in various ways, use OLAP or whatever it is called today to create instant multi dimensional views of the data and create a big data warehouse with simply SQL type of query possibilities and extend that with a super simpel user interface so everybody can use it. I would even think that someone can create a business out of this, so when not done by Steemit Inc, this could be my next startup company, a detailed reporting and analyses tool that I'll sell to business for FIAT currency to use when starting on Steemit.
I agree. This comment from an earlier steemitblog post shows why.
That's just a random example that I happened to remember seeing, but I'm sure many other voters employ the same reasoning. How do you accurately rank the popular posts when the curation reward system is discouraging voters from providing that last bit of information?
Maybe something like splitting 50/50, or 80/20, where part of the reward is split evenly among every voter and the other part is weighted according to the order of vote.
Yes. To put it another way, the reward system undervalues ratification so we get less of it. The problem with 'dumb bots' is the same. Bots (as with any voter) can only be judged dumb or smart by later voters ratifying (or not) their votes. To get smarter bots we need more and better ratification and to get more and better ratification it needs to be better rewarded.
The results are also not wanted. To be honest, I do not know all the reasons, since I do not know what information is correct and what is not/obsolete. I only know that with the 30 minutes behaviour, individuals/curators try to game the system which is unwanted as well. My gut feel says also that votes are not casts for new posts because of this rule, to wait before voting and then account holder will actually forget to vote. This harms mostly the large amount of accounts having lesser followers, which are the majority of the accounts.
When making important changes I don't think we should go by gut feeling. The 30 minute behavior is there to prevent gaming the system because without it things were worse. You can use this bookmarklet to control your vote time, you just have to keep the tab open. I agree, it's not ideal, but I do think it's better than the alternative, and we should be careful about changes unless we know the impact they will have and the history behind why things are the way they are in the first place.
Thank you for the bookmarklet, but probably I'll not use it. First of all to clarify my position: I personally do not use bots for voting, since I'm against auto voting. Bot can be used for filtering and such, but IMHO shall be prevented from direct influence on reward distribution. Voting shall be a manual activity. Furthermore, I think that most of the users on Steemit are here to create posts, read posts and vote honestly, ie without any gaming in mind to maximise their own revenues. With this is mind, I do not understand why we do not have a linear curation curve. After spending 30-45 minutes searching Steemit for relevant post to explain the 30 minutes reverse auction, I think I understood correctly the reverse auction was needed because of the non linear curation curve. Why not bringing this back to linear? BTW, why having a curation algorithm that gives more rewards to the first voters? Network effect, the whitepaper describes; but I refer to my first statement above, I do think most of the Steemians will vote for content when they like it in one way or the other. Why not test this in real rather than assuming those things? Also, note that most of us Steemians do not have the time to spend hours and hours per day on Steemit. It is not the tool that will pay our bills so we do not take and have time to start gaming the system. Bot owners likely do, since they are there to maximise their income, maybe not all, but I suspect most of the bot owners have in mind their revenues. When we would argue that time spend needs to be included in reward distribution, I disagree, since this will for sure prevent Steemit to grow to millions of users. I also read somewhere in the whitepaper the whole reward model is based on the short/long tail model, but I do disagree using such model as a reference; Steemit is dominated by bot voters and they do not take quality into account. The whole idea of most rewards go to the short tail of quality posts is based on quality content which is a parameters the bots are not taking into account. Any feature under discussion is part of a larger discussion IMHO. Such larger discussion needs to happen, but does not IMHO. In parallel, I think we shall test a whole set of different algorithms to see what the effects are in the real world of Steemit.
I could never understand the part why the first voters getting more.
Well said @edje ! Good thoughts I mostly agree with.
There is a logic I can follow, but the hunters of the Finder Fee are gamers and bots instead of you and I and probably the other 99% of the Steemit members. So, only those who like gaming, can use Steemit to game. And those who are engineers, can create bots to play the game for them. I can imagine quite a few whales are gamers.
I want my own bot now !!!! 🐇
LOL