Excuse me and forgive me, maybe I am a party breaker but this is how I see Steemit these days:
And yes, every one of them is making more than a thousand SBDs a day from the pool. Excellent money for the main players. ;)
It is all about Power (Steem Power) and Money (Steem Power) not about the quality of the content. Rank means virtually nothing. And rank should be the sign of the quality. Bots, on the other hand, are the only way starters can make their content visible. Pay to win.
You can be level 0 (bad content) or level 65 if you have 15 Steem on account your voice will be valuable the same, under 1 cent of empowerment. That is how much quality is important here.
Decentralization? North Korea is more decentralized. Few people control everything. Political power in the real world = steem power here.
What is the result? Slave mentality.
Minnows are forced to beg higher ranked member for the upvote in order to succeed.
95% of posts are "nice post" "you are the best" or similar pathetic garbage because people are forced into submission. I am here almost a month and have seen a few posts which have grown into a quality debate. In-depth conversation is almost non-existent.
So let's be honest, this project is not about decentralization or "empowering people", it is about making money with bots.
You guys have made an interesting project, but it can very easily slide into a project that looks more like hell than Facebook itself.
I know, someone will reply with "moron/looser, go back to Facebook" but I still believe that for rational people critic is far more valuable than shallow praise.
For now, this is more Greedit than Steemit, but you have the power to change that before it becomes too late and we get one more Facebook and few more Zuckerbergs.
You mention a lot of problems many of us think long and hard addressing, but what do you suggest? If these were easy problems to solve, we likely would have fixed them by now.
How about steemit.inc puts their considerable SP into the hands of the community for the purposes of moderating abuse and gradually decentralising their stake?
YES! Yes yes yes. Bloody Facebook is going it and I wish to God I got @ned to read my article on the subject last week.
https://steemit.com/facebook/@techslut/facebook-invests-millions-in-community-leaders-what-steemit-inc-should-learn-from-this
From what I understand, they already delegated a large portion of SP to the SteemCleaners organization.
That's really good, but I mean a heck of a lot more.
I'm with you on decentralizing their stake, but I'm gonna pull a @timcliff on you and ask, cool story bro, how do?
I like the concept, but I don't know how we would decentralize that distribution and not create more clique empowered voting rings around newly empowered wealthy delegation recipients.
Remember when Ned gave a bunch of random people half a mill each last summer for inexplicable reasons? Like sweetssj and the ramen recipe / bikini photoshoot team for "quality curation"?
Meh.
My suggestion would be to give voting power to the rank. Not necceraly 25, but 50+ should have some voting power not 0.01.
I think there's two main contradictions here. One is the method of finding content. The other is assessing it's quality. Both of these contribute towards the current rewards pool abuse / vote-ringing low-quality content.
I think active competition can solve both of these problems.
I hope communities can promote that competition.
As it stands, content is flooded. There should be an overhaul to finding content by tags.
What other ways though? I'm not a developer. Idk. 3-dimensional content feeds with a GUI that lets you explore posts like through minecraft? lol. I've no idea.
As for quality (avoiding $1000 ramen recipes), there needs to be some kind of decentralized 'state apparatus' at play, a la content editors or something. If a post is made in a community, members of that community should be able to assess its quality.
I like Sola.ai approach, how they solved the problem of visibility. Great content is much more likely to be noticed there if you choose the right chanel. They don't support articles over 250 characters tho.
How about a new tab called,
Inordinately Inflated Posts Upvoted by Self-Paid Bots
Too long? Maybe just a new tab, next to Trending called
Big$Bots
Just funnel all the posts that have been immediately and significantly upvoted by bots into a new tab. That way, we know what we are getting under that tab. Easy fix.
:D
we could name it "derivative content"
Or self-paid whales.
Good one 😂🤣
Actually, there's already a "promoted" tab. Even a non-coder like me can easily categorize any post upvoted by a paid service as "promoted". :)
this is all off the top of my head.
remove voting or at least remove self voting over a certain level. either way this needs to be seriously overahuled.
users get to decide which 'party' or 'community' they can join. they don't have to but make it so they have positive incentives to do so, specifically incentives to contribute quality and not spammy shit posts.
content is generated under specific types. Types are tags. Communities or parties oversee these tags and moderate them
all communities can elect/recall mods /editors/etc
people can invest a stake in communities / delegate power to mods. the success of the party/community can get a percentage of investment return
content can be rated (valued) by an algorithm and not just a clickable and abusable vote system. possible variables include:
-number of views that reach the end of the post
-number of clicks on the post
-number of comments
-number of author replies
-number of 'stakes' in the article. 'stakes' are limited (X#/day and their value depends on user level. basically a reduced voting system)
poor quality content has to effectively compete within the ecosystem of a party/community. No more trash posts on trending with 7th grade writing levels.
users of a certain level can report posts to mods based on certain criteria. "poor quality" should be one.
"poor quality" should be when the content of the article and the reward have no logical correlation. this sounds like it could be abused, but i really don't think so. it's obvious when an article is dumb, or has bad writing (probably most obvious for 'story' and 'fiction') yet the upvotes are there solely because of a mafia/brigade/vote-ring.
communities can debate a mod decision. ensure that there is democratic potential to veto. this would require active participation from people, and that I admit is unlikely since 90% of the user base I see on this site are sycophants and shills.
Those are a lot of issues, and some can't be solved by non-coders. The problem is prioritization. Instead of solving problems, they're developing features aimed at entrepreneurs (money) instead of improving the existing product.
1 Can’t be effectively done. Users will just create sock puppet to continue upvoting themselves.
2-4 basically what is planned for communities.
5 basically what is planned for SMTs
6 these are easily gameable. Please read the whitepaper.
7 this is a want, not a proposal. There is no proposal to actually accomplish this
8 also part of communities
9 I don’t understand what you mean
10 or they can leave and join a different community
Thanks for the engaging.
I’m hopeful that communities will help promote some kind real competition for what counts as ‘quality’ content. I’m deeply critical of monetizing social media, but still think there’s a lot of potential in this project.
Again, real competition, I think, will solve a lot of issues and I think communities can promote that competition.
Well, I am not in the position to solve it, but I am 100% sure that those problems are not unsolvable. It is obvious, even from the newbie perspective, that if you want to promote quality content rank should have more power, maybe even more than steem power. It will make the inequality between the rich and the poor less influential, which even in real life is one of the main goals of each government. Here, the equality is only deepening with botting.
I'm not in a position to solve the problem because I have very little data, but here's, now I'm thinking of the system as at auction to make better use of the promotion tab and kill botting. The user, instead of using bots, could determine a deposit guaranteeing the quality of the post. If he succeeds to get upvoted for that amount that he has set up then keeps the earnings and the caution, if he does not succeed, he will lose everything (or just caution, cant calculate it now). Highest amount will have the highest visibility. I do not know if it is feasible but it is one of the ideas that came to mind after a few minutes of thinking. People who deal with it will make better ideas for sure if they really want.
The point is that at this moment the focus is on the economy, which is oversized, so steemit looks like a greedy man/bot without a soul, at least to newbies. The awareness that a change is needed in that direction would be a major step, and the people working on the project are smart enough to put it into practice. If they were not smart, they would not come this far.
I like to see problem solvers on here. And as a matter of fact, the board does comb the platform for feedback. They may be brilliant each in their own right, but a lot of the successful apps and implementations on here have come directly from the masses.
Agree
Can't kill bots. Am I a bot or not?
Actually, I appreciate you bringing this up. While I certainly applaud the Steem Team's effort, and am so grateful for this remarkable platform... as a newbie, I have some concerns about these bots.
Is there a plan in the works to counter-act them? I've encountered many Steemians with the same questions and concerns. Thank you, @crossroad for addressing this very pertinent issue.
I know they're working on tightening restrictions on signups to make them more organic, for starters. But as far as a steem-wide effort, I haven't heard of anything other than vigilante work. A lot of us are out there trying to scrape up the algae at the bottom. I have a "stupidcomments" post, and I tag spammers (or, give noobs a link to how to comment so they can create positive feedback on here). But other than the small users out there like me and a few others I know, I'm not seeing a combined effort yet.
I have a couple of people I'm thinking of getting together with to make it more of a thing.
Ive seen your cut and paste spam replies, and they are patient, gracious, and brilliant. Sadly to your vigilante point though I have to ask you to keep doing them, because there is no way to stop it, nor is there a way to stop bots.
Am I a bot? Or not?
See the problem?
Thanks!
The answer is below.
Is it sad that this is the nicest flower I've ever received? lol Thanks - for the flower and the answer.
If you are on the profile pictures you probably receive tons of flowers each day ;)
He's smooooth, real smoooooth! :) ^
blushing Evidently, there are no gentlemen, such as yourself @crossroads, around me.
@littlescribe, thanks for the reply. I am aware of a new effort to clean up ONE troll, but I think I saw you on in the comment section of @fulltimegeek 's latest post. :D
Your blog is overwhelmingly beautiful. It literally left me speechless. Please stay great and humble. People like you can cure this placeand the world, i believe.
Aww, you are too kind. We are all in this together, right? And we are ALL making the world a better place, just by participating in Steemit. Well, most of us. LOL
I'm hoping communities will change this. Much of these whales, who base themselves on voting rings, post complete dogshit-tier quality posts. If you challenge them on this, they defend their profits like mafia, through harassment and coercion (flagging and brigading).
The problem is that the site structure itself both promotes this mafia activity (through the 'vote' button) and prevents users from doing anything about it.
Yes, thats what bothers me too. Thanks for bringing this up!
I upvoted you and agree with what you say, unlike reddit here I feel a repercussion if I comment saying that someone is talking shit, so often I just shut up. Also, flag gangs can be tough, and bots... and so on.
I love the idea of tokenize and gamify the content though, and steemit is, let's face it, the first in this, and is doing amazingly good for being a pioneer. What I'd like to hear more from you is: do you dislike the tokenization in general? If you still feel that it's a good idea, how would you improve steemit? That kind of constructive critic is what I love in posts.
Thank you @devcore for your input, my opinion is the same. Its impossible to not love tokenization. You get money for what you usually do for free. Who doesn't love that? But it has the price. People are much less likely to dislike and tell the unpleasant truth if they will lose money for doing that, so we have lack of the real discussions and lots of false agreeability. It can be solved only with the algorithm and we can give general ideas, but the magic is still in the hands of the developers. So what we can do is raising awareness in one or another direction, but not to solve sundries. That's my opinion.
Oopps. i just realise this problem. yeah, newbie like have to work really really hard on writing and posting a good content to increase my reputation to gain the money, buy when an account comes with the money the are stronger than me even if the account was just in the lower reputation. it's not really help the poor then, it is making the rich become richer and the poor have to work harder and work for long time to get rich.
and i think the board have to see this problem as a important issues.
Are you describing a planet called Earth, or the decentralized steem ecosystem, because on this particular point they both work exactly the same way. This is a job. Roll up your sleeves and do it or not. Choice is yours. I've seen plenty of penniless people from 3rd world countries become wealthy here. Were they asking for someone to save them? Nope, they already know it's like life, and got busy and got on with it.
It only depends will you do the "dirty" work or not. There are people who are completely fine with using bots to promote garbage content. I tried that on my first posts myself, I must admit, but I felt bad and stopped. There is the difference between working hard in a regulated, functional system and working hard to exploit the vulnerabilities of the system. Some people can, some cant, some can to some degree...nothing bad with that, but habits always remain. We are all different.