My original title for this article was "Should @Tagalong Stay Away From #Steemit", but once I started writing it, I realized that #steemit (the tag) isn't the problem. I've been heading up the @Tagalong project for nearly a month now and the insight it's given me into the current Steemit climate has been interesting to say the least, downright frustrating to say the most.
If I can have seven minutes of your time today, I've got a few of them to share with you. However I must warn you in advance that I will be asking you for your action at the end, so if you don't really care about the @Tagalong project and what we're attempting to accomplish, then you can go ahead and move right along there, mister/missy. No hard feelings. I promise.
If you're interested in what we're learning and would like to help, then by all means please stick around. I've saved you a seat!
Without further ado, here's "Why Steemit Sucks and We Should Let the Past Die...Kill it if we have-"
wooookay there Kylo. Calm down. It's not that bad.
Let's look at some statistics.
Not What I was Expecting
The first and most realistic thing I can show you is statistics. Cold, hard numbers. I've spent a lot of time compiling the first month's efforts into understandable metrics to show off, and what they've revealed is quite interesting. Let's start with success rates. Below is a list of every change/flag in @Tagalong's history of service***.
| Tag | # of Changes | # of Flags | Success Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| #steemit | 26 | 35 | 42.62% |
| #writing | 3 | 29 | 9.38% |
| #life | 5 | 26** | 16.13% |
| #travel | 0 | 24** | 0% |
| #introduceyourself | 9 | 21 | 30% |
| #story | 1 | 19 | 5% |
| #fiction | 1 | 17 | 5.56% |
| #steem | 9 | 9 | 50% |
| #photography | 1 | 8 | 11.11% |
| #contest | 1 | 4 | 20% |
| #nature, #colorchallenge, #meme, #money, #video | 0 | 4 | 0%* |
| #kr | 1 | 3 | 25% |
| #art, #news | 0 | 3 | 0% |
| #crypto, #health | 0 | 3 | 0%* |
| #spanish | 0 | 2 | 0% |
| #blockchain, #funny | 0 | 2 | 0%* |
| #photo | 2 | 1 | 66.67% |
| #blog, #family, #freewrite, #love | 0 | 1 | 0% |
| #cn, #deutsch | 0 | 1 | 0%* |
| #baby, #horse, #witness, #artzone, #article, #giveaway | 1 | 0 | 100% |
* These flags are all specifically related to ongoing action against a single spam account.
** 20 of these flags were issued to a single user that has since corrected their tag usage.
*** There are currently 2 users on @Tagalong's blacklist that receive flags instantly without explanation or warning every time they post with incorrect tags: @peaceloveliberty and @zaynwalker.
Accounting for outliers, our highest traffic tags are #steemit, #writing, #introduceyourself, #story and #fiction. (This is mostly because I'm one doing the searching and curating and I stick to writing tags.) With #steemit, our change-to-flag ratio is about 40%, which is near average for the overall success rate. Many users use #steemit when they don't know what else to tag with and are willing to update tags when prompted/provided another option.
#writing, #fiction and #story are another thing entirely. Our success rate in these related categories overall totals to a dismal 7.14%. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case:
- Poor curation from accounts like @wafrica, @silvergoldbotty/@ssg-community and @kryptonia, often automatic, that continues to incentivize improper behavior.
- Continued abuse by accounts like Instructor2121 on @wordsthatflow that are beyond @Tagalong's scope to impact.
- Incentivized short-form content (not poetry- suited for #blog or #life) that doesn't belong in #writing.
#introduceyourself is a nightmare, but one that's important to curate with @Tagalong so that a precedent of correct tagging is set from the get-go. There are other services like @intro-bot that help, but the battle is an uphill battle due to accounts like @partiko that continue to reward users after their first #introduceyourself post, thereby incentivizing the behavior for redfish. And don't even get me started with people like @the.success.club who bid-bot #introduceyourself for visibility.
The simple truth of the matter is that @Tagalong still doesn't have the VP to significantly deter impropper tagging by anyone other than redfish (which is why my ongoing joke in certain Discord communities is that I thrive on the tears of redfish). I fully believe that @Tagalong's success rate could be higher, but in order to get it there we're going to need more Delegators willing to fight abuse. Current VP sets the average 20% per tag flag at -0.017 STU or just under $0.02.
Plankton-Spam
HF20 did a phenomenal job at reducing the auto-spam from redfish accounts and the impact on the created feed is noticeable. It didn't begin to scratch the surface of the manual and auto-spam that emanates from plankton, however. Because I spend so much time dredging the created feed, I've accrued a list of over fifteen accounts that regularly post spam content without any kind of RC consequences because they have the SP to do it. To make matters worse, often times this spam is outside of @Tagalong's jurisdiction. Have a look at @theinvisibleman, who posts the same stories over and over again with names replaced or @wordsthatflow, a circle-jerk account upvote dump which posts 6-7 spam posts to #writing, #story and #fiction a day. One from this morning's dive posts meaningless text posts every day in order to farm @kryptonia upvotes for a value of up to 0.14 STU or $0.14 per post.
Why This Matters
Steem's economy is inflationary. Every token created, every upvote allocated continues to drive down the price of Steem inherently when there's no incoming value to match the increasing supply. When you have tokens being allocated in places like this due to illicit visibility, irresponsible auto-curation and self-voting, it hurts the overall economy. Sure, most of what @Tagalong sees is amounts of $0.02 here and $0.05 there, but when you start adding that up, what began as a small problem becomes a much larger one. In a month of activity, @Tagalong has returned $1.83 to the reward pool to be allocated to content creators who are abiding by the rules of the system and are trying to make it here on Steemit. Recent large delegations will only serve to increase that number, but we can be doing better.
The Part You're Gonna Skip
So here's what I'm asking from you.
10SP.
That's it.
Really.
See?
For many of you that's less than 5% of your overall voting power, but in the same way that $0.02 amounts start to add up to the detriment of the economy, 10SP delegations begin to add up to an amount that will help @Tagalong be more effective. I'm asking my followers and anyone who reads this post to delegate at least 10SP to @Tagalong in an attempt to increase the effectiveness and success rate of the project. If you can and are willing to delegate more, we would be even more appreciative.
If you can't or won't do that, then my next hope is that you'll help us to identify and address mis-tagged content as you come across it in the wild. I have GinaBot set up to notify me whenever someone tags @Tagalong, so a simple comment will be enough to get my attention. You can also join our Discord server and help out in the background if you'd like.
Together we can help make Steemit stronger, I believe that. All it takes is a lot of little people like you and me deciding to do something big to make a difference.
That's all I've got for you today, thanks for reading and please consider delegating 10SP to increase the effectiveness of the @Tagalong project!
Cheers,
~ Mako
Thanks for reading!
Check out my most recent posts here:
Why I Use Steampeak (And Why You Should Too!)
Zen Coloring Contest #36 Entry
My Current Ongoing Story:
Kayde's Tale (Part 1)
Alora's Tale (Part 2)
Kayde & Alora's Tale (Part 3)
My friend you have taken on a head pummeling role...But I absolutely love the noble sentiment behind it!
You are completely accurate about some communities incentivising poor behaviour that goes against the tenets of the platform, there are some horrific abuse-tags at play right now and they are ripe for pillaging the reward pool...This is a disheartening state of affairs that we can not afford right now especially...The platform is going through somewhat of a lull (euphemistic I know) and we need uplifting, inspiring developments not more that have the unyielding capacity to drag us down further into the
sh...Mud.Kudos to you for making a stand, but you are right it needs to be a community backed stand not one that you are charged with carrying forward alone. I cannot even contemplate the delegation right now, but as I grow a little bit more...I have some plans and initiatives that should spur my growth significantly in the near future...I will promise you a near-future-pledge of 10 steem...Feel free to nudge and remind me of this, this old brain is not quite what it was 😁
The very best wishes to you for the next stage of the journey my friend...I suspect it is gonna be fun, fulfilling and filled with friends 😃
Hey @makowrites, I found your post interesting and would like to help in some small way by using @tagalong if and when I spot misuse. I’ll probably have to read your other article on tagging to become a little more knowledgeable first though. As you say it’s a matter for all of us little people to make steemit stronger.
Absolutely! Just mention @tagalong in the comments if you come across something that seems fishy and I’ll swing by!
~ Mako
Will do 👍
Hi @makowrites This is just to let you know that...
You got SNEKKED!
Because we love your post!!
You Got Snekked is a curation project!
We aim to find good content, share a happy moment, & some visibility. Your post got our upvote, and we will feature your post and possibly an image from it in our 47th curation compilation if you don't mind! If you don't want to be featured, please let us know!
You can find us on Discord -:
https://discord.gg/VWJxTEz
Thanks guys!
~ Mako
It sounds like you have given yourself a huge, time-consuming task. I'll be checking out the @tagalong project a little more tomorrow, when I can do it on my laptop instead of on my phone....
Posted using Partiko Android
It does take a lot, yes. A lot to find, a lot to manually go through and review. I'd like to have a team capable of helping but I don't really right now short of a few others who help me find abuse.
~ Mako
Do you issue a warning before flagging?
Posted using Partiko Android
He lying he's flagged me multiple times with no warning https://steemit.com/travel/@steemwhalepower/kangaroo-valley
https://steemit.com/steemwhalepower/@steemwhalepower/6h5xfg-hi-guys
Always.
~ Mako
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by Mako from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 23 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 16 SBD worth and should receive 212 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigI have to confess I'm not the best at tags myself, they can be a powerful tool if you use them right - after all the theory is simple they bind together posts of similar content - so if you specialise in doing posts about Baking Cakes using #bakingcakes as a tag makes sense and you should be able to then look through other posts in that tag and enjoy from content from other cake bakers.
Sadly as much as people who should use tags don't (because like me they are bit befuddled by them), also others have worked out it's a great spring board to get their random meme or cut and paste content rewarded because they know a certain tag will get auto voted.
I really don't envy the task you have set yourself, but it's a good project as long as the focus is not just punishing misuse - but also educating correct use and about how tags should be used - I think many still are legitimately making a mistake rather then trying to gain from use of a tag.
I have put in a small delegation because I see @tagalong already has a strong backing from highly respectable Steemians, and this post is backed by @poeticsnake.
#thealliance #witness
Thanks for your delegation, every little bit helps! I wrote a loose guide on how I decide on tags back here that may be of some use to you. Part of my ongoing goal of helping educate Steemians on how to get their content seen in the most positive ways possible!
Cheers,
~ Mako