When Steem and steemit.com were first released, growth was explosive because for the first time it was possible for a community of like-minded people to congregate on the Internet on a platform that they could earn a stake in.
It was also possible to get curated by humans instead of bots, whales even! People would actually read your posts and vote for them if they liked them. Lots of people would see it and upvote it if they liked it. There was real interaction. It was beautiful! I loved it so much. Then came the bidbots. Now the beauty is gone. It is replaced by greed. Votes are sold to the highest bidder. The crowdsourced content discovery mechanism has been completely undermined and it could have been prevented. A culture against vote selling could have been and could still be established, but not while Steemit Inc. endorses it.
From these experiments we learned that, yes, a blockchain could be used to store social information, distribute tokens among community members by leveraging crowdsourced stake-weighted voting (a/k/a Proof-of-Brain), and this could be done in a way that supports the bootstrapping of a digital currency. Over one million accounts created, 50,000 daily active users, and a token featured on many exchanges is proof that a community-backed token can deliver a ton of value.
This is not what happens anymore. It's not about PoB anymore.
Although the changes for Communities will roll out in phases, the end result will be every bit as disruptive as the original release of the Steem blockchain.
Except for the thing that was disruptive in the beginning is now gone. How can you even still pay homage to PoB when you have allowed bid bots to completely undermine that system?
One of the keys to Steem’s success is the fact that it has the unique capability to autonomously align the incentives of community members. We are all so passionate about Steem, because we have all worked so hard to add value to this ecosystem, and have received some amount of stake for our efforts. But again, not everyone is interested in Steem, let alone capable of adding value to it.
Some have worked hard to extract value from the system and have been greatly rewarded for their efforts.
In order to really scale Steem, we have to not just create features that allow communities to form around non-Steem interests, we need to enable those Communities to determine for themselves who is adding value, and reward those people with stake in that community. That’s where Smart Media Tokens come in, which we will discuss in a future post.
That's all well and good, but why do we want to try to add value while others extract it? Even if we have communities that don't have delegation and have a culture against vote selling, it will still dominate Steem and be counter productive to what those communities are trying to do.
We invite anyone with ideas, suggestions, or questions about how we can make Communities work for all Steem developers, to share their thoughts in the comment section below.
You could help to establish a culture that downvotes bid bots. It's probably too late to get rid of delegation now that it's the main way to earn here. You could make a return to PoB on steemit.com - the fire hose for all the communities. You could quit programmatically selling STEEM and crashing the price. You could make the trending page actually posts that are trending instead of just posts that have just paid their way to get there which are basically just a weird form of ads. But I'm guessing this isn't the type of feedback you're looking for and won't even give me a meaningful reply to my comment.
I suspect a big reason bid bots are attractive is because other forms of curation are difficult. Even altruistic voting (e.g. no benefit expected, other than improved system health) is time consuming. Content is disorganized; tags are noisy, and there are no content standards.
By "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism" do you mean votes and trending? Votes and trending should reflect what the community believes are the most valuable contributions, but it's not an effective way to discover under-rewarded (or just undiscovered) content.
In my view, Steem has never had a "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism". The most effective mechanisms were (and still are) manual labor -- digging through feeds, following new users, establishing curation guilds. In the beginning, there were less posts (it was possible to read every single new post), they were higher quality on average, and time spent curating was subsidized by the excitement of it all. Now we need to scale.
Well said, I couldn't agree more!
I think this is the type of thing communities CAN help with. Even altruistic voting gives curation rewards especially if it ends up trending. That was the original design right? It encouraged people to add value which brings more and more value to the platform.
Yes. I agree.
I agree, I think that is still the best way, but now there is no chance for it to "trend" once you have done that work. Does scaling mean that we leave all that work to the bots? If there isn't a chance to trend organically or real human interaction, I don't see the point.
We need tools that make it easy and rewarding to curate. Say you have 1M SP and can make 50 impactful votes per day... how would you most effectively distribute them? To find 50 good but undervalued posts on steemit.com every day might take quite a while. And the modest bump to each one would not provide much exposure (e.g., on trending), which means it's unlikely for others to find it and place more votes on top (and increase your curation return). This discourages cooperation at the social layer and creates a negative feedback loop.
To me, scaling means giving users the tools to solve this dilemma.
Make a list of 100 interesting authors and check their blogs manually on a regular basis. That way you can make 40 of your 50 "impactful votes".
For the 10 remaining "impactful votes" try to find good posts from authors you have never read before to give new users a chance and some motivation to keep writing.
I don't understand why investors always talk about their ROI (here in this special case "curation return")? Their main aim should be to increase the value of STEEM. Voting for 'quality content' (and flagging bid bot supported posts) would be a contribution to a higher value ... (with or without much curation reward).
The value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.
So lets make sure that as many as possible users are having a pleasant user experience (for example also because they might get some impactful manual upvotes from time to time) and thus stay here. Lets do that as investors to save our investment.
If you have one million STEEM it's not most important to get even more STEEM, it's important to increase the value of these STEEM you already own.
For example I have much more STEEM than a year ago, but my account value has decreased significantly.
Did I need 'ROI' when I bought BTC some years ago? Or am I happy about the high value of my BTC nowadays? :)
Nothing against ROI, but I think we shouldn't be that focused on it ...
Making LISTS has actually really helped with this. I have a few different lists I use and i find my voting is EASIER and I actually do it way more often. So I think that is one really solid solution.
I have a list of my friends, I have a list of splinterlands type accounts, a list of accounts that seem to influence a lot of the conversation about steem itself, then i have a list of almost 100 photographers that's the one that has the most action.
All that was made possible thanks to Hivemind. Aka i'm talking about lists on steempeak if people didn't know. But that's not the important part it's the idea that LISTS really have done what you said.
Exactly! Well said! I guess maybe they don't use the platform, so they don't see the issue. But c'mon, how short sighted can they be. How can they not listen to so many people who use the platform. I hope you get a reply. Your point is spot on.
We do use the platform, but we also have to build the solutions necessary to fix the problems, and that simply takes time. I don't see your comment disagreeing with our views very much at and feel like we are simply talking past one another. We agree that there are problems with the system. What system doesn't have problems? We're trying to lay out very clearly how we are developing and conceptualizing the solutions we have developed and continue to develop at every layer of the stack.
If we were just front end developers, or just blockchain developers, or just middleware developers, as many in the space are, we would be able to move much faster in any one of those domains. But because no one else is doing what we're doing, we have to develop in all of these domains and the consequence is that if one has too narrow of a focus, the progress appears to be slow when in reality it is quite fast, which is why no other blockchain rivals Steem in its core value propositions, and steemit.com remains by far the most used Steem interface in the world.
I like all the things that y'all have done recently, but they don't fix the bid bot problem and I don't believe communities will either. I think they are great steps in the right direction, but why would people want to build communities in a place where vote selling dominates? I'm not talking past you. I'm replying specifically to what was said with my honest thoughts.
I'm not complaining about your pace. I'm saying that y'all could start a culture against bid bots and you haven't. You have endorsed it. What is Steem's core value proposition? My position is that Steem's core value proposition is undermined by bid bots and you aren't doing what is needed to fix it.
Thanks for your support. :)
By the way, I am looking forward for the communities to come. They should be a step into the right direction ...
Yeah, definitely. Me too.
Could it be because they are investors?
That would be like working hard for a whole day and sharing the pay with thousands of other people...
You can't expect most people sacrifice their time and effort mostly for the benefit of others like that. The fact that it is fruitless to expect that caused socialism to fall.
The problem here is misaligned incentives.
I don't think PoB can even theoretically work very well except in communities where most of the stake is controlled by a single app that rewards content creators strictly according to quality. Under that scenario, the main stakeholder has enough power and an incentive to curb abuse and reward commensurately to value created.
Steem with its fast block processing time and free transactions is well suited to serve as the base layer powering an archipelago of such token economies. EIP+WP is a step toward Steem becoming a non-PoB base layer and that's a good thing. Those things will help Steem limp onwards, hopefully for a few years more, to spread stake further before content rewards can be discontinued for good.
Unfortunately, Steemit, Inc still controls too large a stake for Steem to be sufficiently decentralized to be secure against external threats. As long as a form of PoB is practiced with STEEM, SBD and Vests, it would be in the best interests of Steemit, Inc as the largest stakeholder to help the community fight abusive maximisers and non-economic abusers who harass community members for their personal gratification. That would also help. Doing it correctly is easier said than done but it's an issue that should be on the table.
I would prefer to share a huge cake with others instead to have a very small cake for myself alone.
Again, if their behaviour contributed to a higher STEEM price, and if they have a lot of STEEM, I couldn't see a sacrifice at all.
As I said, I consider myself as investor, as well, I have earned quite some STEEM within the last one and a half year ... and the value of my account has decreased a lot at the same time: the size of the cake matters, not one's percentage of the cake.
I plead for a committee of elected users with some delegated Steem power from Steemit, Inc., which could decide which stuff to flag and also (in case someone complains) if flags are justified or not, and if "yes" just counter them with upvotes.
In addition, accounts who repeatedly misuse flags in an abusive way (instead using them against spam, plagiarism etc.) could be flagged, as well, after a decision of that committee.
I don't know what you'd consider good but stuff like this deserves to go undiscovered not earning nearly $150.00 using bidbots to go trending.
https://steemit.com/art/@jellenmark/thanos-reimagined-with-infinity-2019-7-1-16-59-28
You guys actually think that people are going to downvote crap like this after the hardfolk to keep folks like this in line but the reality is when brought out into the spotlight in a post not even SFR would touch it because of who was behind paying the bidbots on it. This post was at the most worth about as much as the paper it was written on. This is one of the major reason Steem can't get out of it slump and attract new users.
I wouldn't neccesarily decide that I had to give an equal vote to 50 post for one thing. I would give votes at different percentages based on what I thought they deserved. I do see this dilemna and that's why I'm not railing against delegation or curation guilds. My points were mainly about bidbots. How do bidbots help to scale?
Or a better way to put that question: why not just use delegation and curation guilds instead of bid bots? Bid bots are what undermines the trending page. So shouldn't we focus on solutions that don't undermine the trending page and the whole idea of curation in the first place?
Before bidbots were selfvoters and circle jerks. @haejin and @ranchorelaxo, for example. @berniesanders for another. Bots aren't the source of evil, they just automate it.
@berniesanders actually made the first bid bot. But yes circle jerking is another seperate problem. Because there are other problems, does that mean it's not worth trying stop this problem?
I definitely see how delegation and curation guilds can be justified for the reasons you mentioned. And I see the use in projects like @curie and @tribesteemup, but those don't make the entire trending page sold to the highest bidder like bid bots do.
It isn't social media when bots are the voters. Society isn't even involved in curation then. It's just mining with automated tools. I've no interest in mining. I'm here for the ideas people exchange.
That's where the actual value of Steem is: the social interaction.
Well yes, but the original design was for curation rewards to be 50%, and they also did not have the penalty for the first 30-, 15- or soon to be 5-minutes. The changes that were made later, largely impulsively and without good rationale, undermined a lot of that balance to the point that curation rewards became almost meaningless, and the incentives to just sell votes became overwhelmingly strong.
The hope is that HF21 is going to re-balance those incentives somewhat back toward what you describe, where altruistic or at least non-agnostic voting isn't so heavily penalized relative to vote selling. We'll see how it works out but it's certainly a step toward what you describe.
Oh really, I didn't even realize it was originally 50/50. I hit 3 years here the other day and as far as I'm aware it's always been 75/25 during that time. I could be wrong about that as I'm just going off of memory.
I do think HF21 is a step in the right direction towards rebalancing those incentives. I'll be paying close attention to see the effects. I like the idea of incentivizing that altruistic behavior and I might even prefer that to instilling it as a culture, but I'm open to both routes to moving away from vote selling completely.
The change from 50/50 was made in mid 2016 so it is quite possible you weren't around for it.
@schoolofminnows is the solution to all your problems.
Posted using Partiko Android
No it's not.
Yes it is
Posted using Partiko Android
Somewhere, along the way, I lost the spark, to say the things you said here today.
It is, quite literally, the shittiest feeling in the world, as I work on that next post, knowing hours in advance, no matter what I do, that post will fail and not get anywhere on Steemit, after nearly three years of being here, 786 posts under my belt, and my blog is consistently one of the most active on the entire platform.
Tribes are helping.
I don't blame anyone here, old or new, for being frustrated with those damn bidbots. The Darwin Award winners two years in a row.
Agreed 100% @richardcrill and your comment supported 100% with the full weight of the @ecotrain community behind it. I speak with confidence on behalf of @eco-alex who is currently in seclusion, and ob behalf of a diverse and growing part of the steem community.
Thank you for awesome leadership, as always
Thank you @artemislives! I really appreciate it. I know a lot of the people who feel this way left a long time ago, but I really wish the people behind Steemit Inc. and @steemitblog will listen to the people who are still here. It seems people want to earn as much STEEM as possible without adding value and even devaluing the platform and the coin. It seems very short sighted to me. I hope they consider their users input.
They never do, different day same bull crap, the answer is as simple as the nose of their faces but what they've built here is exclusive community of wealth abusers whom they themselves are afraid of.
That's what people do.
Cannot agree more @richardcrill - and I am sure the entire @naturalmedicine community would agree too, as well as many communities here that are just getting by and trying to manually create to reward users, with great members doing their best to comment and be good Steemplayers but getting disheartened. I see so many great quality posts going nowhere, and no incentive for people to write great posts. So a wonderful post about perimenopause can get a less of a payout than a blurry photo of a mango smoothie someone has used a bidbot on.
Your response is clear, concise, measured and deserves a reply. xxx
Thank you @riverflows. It was nice to get a couple replies from @roadscape, but he didn't really address what I said. I don't think he has any thing to say to my last replies to him.
This is such important insight Richard. I agree with you 100%. I hope what you’ve said here is genuinely considered by anyone who wants to see this blockchain reach its potential. The SCOT communities have already done much to address these issues. I think it’s a great direction.
Thank you for saying so @choosefreedom. Sadly the people that had a lot of stake that saw this problem have mostly left. The people that are here now with significant stake don't seem to see the bid bots as a problem. Not sure why @acidyo doesn't seem to see it. @ned must be for the bidbots. I know @heimindanger sees this and he is still here. Maybe if someone forks his DTube code to make a blogging platform it could work. @dan saw the problem and couldn't get enough of the other people with significant stake to see it so he left. I know @ats-david and @krnel were vocal about it too, but I think they have realized that it's not going to change.
@ned has fled the battlefield. :)
Lol, apparently he has.
@acidyo has been consistently against bid bots for long time. He even founded @ocdb as a form of lesser evil to mitigate the effect of the post quality agnostic majority of bid bots.
I knew I had a favorable impression of him in my mind. But I guess like many, myself included, we gave up. After realizing the biggest stake holders weren't going to fix it. I guess after I made my tribe, I realized that communities won't fix this problem. It's a step in the right direction and I am all for it, but it doesn't fix this glaring problem. I don't blame @acidyo for giving up, but I just can't sit with it anymore. Something has to change. So many things in this world have been over taken by short sighted greed. I will no longer accept it. I will always point it out in places where I know there are people and possibilities for change. I'm not gonna fight against Steemit Inc. forever though. I've learned that fighting against something is often not the way to go. We will probably just have to create something better that isn't controlled by greed. But I had to try to save something I loved. Quality standards are an improvement to bid bots, but selling votes to the highest bidder, even with standards, ruins the whole idea. If we could start a culture against bid bots and get communities going, I believe we can save this thing. If we don't get rid of bid bots, somebody will and I will go there and support it. If no one does it soon, maybe I will try to do it myself.
Crowdsourced and stake-based content discovery and rewarding, also known as Proof-of-Brain, has been proven a failure, at least in its ideal form. It is, however, better than just wasting power like PoW. I think what the network and all its participants have generated in the three years of Steem's existence is much better than entropy which is the only thing PoW leaves in its wake.
At the very least, having been a participant has taught me many lessons about human nature. The difficulty of getting anyone to join has also been an eye opener.
By the way, I don't think bid bots are the crux of the matter. Vote farming is. Bid bots are but one of the many ways to accomplish ROI maximization at the cost of putting in the effort to curate altruistically.
Then again does that matter? I think Steem is still a shitload of fun and the money is vastly better than on any mainstream platform in spite of everything.
What's great about communities is that each community has an opportunity to create their own variant of PoB, some of which may actually work. What I think has the best possibility of working is an app owning the vast majority of stake in a community token and treating content creators like freelancers and keeping other curators in line by negating any abusive voting done by them.
Proof-of-brain is not an alternative to proof of work, delegated proof of stake (DPoS) is.
Proof-of-brain and content voting generally could be turned off entirely and the Steem blockchain would continue to run, apps which don't rely on the voting for rewards such as SteemMonsters and others would still be working fine, etc.
Proof-of-brain was one feature added to the Steem blockchain intended to help it attract users and grow. It worked to some extent but its effectiveness to date has been fairly limited.
I'm fully aware of that. However, Steem allots some of the token inflation to content creators and curators.
I know. I've actually been saying for quite some time that I wouldn't mind if PoB were discontinued at the base layer at some point but not any time soon (meaning a few years).
It has made also made the stake distribution somewhat more decentralized. Even if it didn't add too much value otherwise in terms of driving traffic, it has furthered the decentralization of stake.
well said Richard!
Thanks man.
^^^^ All of this
Letting bidbots do their thing was really a bad choice in hindsight.
It seems pretty clear to a lot of us. A lot of us also called it out when they first started, but I guess Steemit Inc. disagrees.
I was there at Steemfest 2 when Ned vocally expressed his opinion on bidbots: "interesting to see how such businesses can flourish within the Steem ecosystem"
Haven't seen the new Steemit Inc team make a radical change on this as of yet.
I wish @ned wasn't so short sighted and greedy. He is killing one of the coolest experiments I've ever seen. Maybe he is naive, maybe he is corrupted by money and power. Maybe he's taken a position that his ego won't let him go back on. Whatever it is, I'm tired of not getting an answer from him. He has lead this thing down the drain. Grow a pair @ned. Reply to me.
This is a superbly worded reply.
@richardcrill you have at least one new fan