Reveal spoiler
Sorry if the title comes off a bit arrogant. I've only been here a few days, but I have a good eye for these things. I appreciate all the work the devs do and mean no disrespect by anything I write in this post. I'm super excited about Steemit because it has vast potential and I want to see it TO DA MOON!!!11 That being said, with vast potential comes vast room for improvement.
This community's primary goals should be:
- generating creative content
- getting that content to people who want to experience it
- gaining trust from the general public
- equating hard work with success
- aiming for free-to-play instead of pay-to-win
- squashing the potential pyramid scheme that could overtake Steemit
- improved decentralization
- constantly trying to evolve Steemit to solve problems
- preventing people from trying to exploit the blockchain.
- eliminate bots/spammers/plagiarism/etc.
- add forum style discussion
Steemit gives great incentive to content creators. It feels amazing that currency is literally being made of thin air when people hit the upvote button. This is top notch work and I'm absolutely blown away by this site's ingenious design. The problem is that the site also gives great incentive to plagiarize, bot, spam, and exploit.
Flag Bounties Required
Curation rewards are an amazing mechanic, but we need to take it one step further. For Steemit to grow into the best social media outlet of all time, a reward needs to be added for flagging bad content in addition to curating good content. I've already discussed the advantages of micro-charges. By applying the same micro-deposit incentives with flagging as we do with curation, Steemit will instantly be cleared of most it's undesirable content and behavior.
Flagging content should cost voting power and work almost exactly the same as curation. When an account has been rightfully flagged it should be punished by losing Steem Power. The one's who flagged the content should each receive a cut of this SP.
Steem Power broken?
When I first heard about this mechanic I thought it was great. It's a currency that measures how much the community trusts you. Then I found out you can buy it. WHAT?! It's design like this that really really makes this site look like a pyramid scheme. You shouldn't be able to buy integrity. Steem power decides where the majority of money on the entire blockchain goes. Being able to buy this kind of influence is a huge red flag that only serves to centralize the economy. It also completely undermines the option to get paid in all Steem power.
Steem power is a measure of how much the community trusts you to distribute community money fairly. Obviously, we only want to give massive amounts of SP to the most incorruptible community members. It stands to reason that there needs to be a severe way to punish whales that try to exploit this community. That's where my previous flagging idea comes in. High SP players will be under constant scrutiny because penalties will be percentage based. The monetary and reputation (SP) penalty/rewards to catch a whale abusing the system will be much higher than a minnow. Whales need to be held to a very high standard. If they can't handle it they should power down.
For example, lets say I got flagged for doing something stupid like copyright infringement because I put a Star Destroyer in my post. No big deal, maybe I lose 1% of my SP for that infraction. I'm a small minnow so that would be less than 1 SP, and I learned early that I'm not allowed to do that. However, 1% to a whale could be huge. Also, multiple counts of the same infraction should increase the penalty. 1%, 2%, 3%, etc.
If it isn't already, SP should be weighted logarithmically to further promote decentralization. A person with ten million SP shouldn't have a much louder voice than someone with a million or even 100,000, but a person with 1000 should be significantly more influential than someone with 500. I'm not quite sure what the equation should be... just that it should have log in it.
Weighted Search Lottery
SP should also affect how likely it is for your posts to get seen at the top of a list of posts. Every post should have its own SP value equal to the SP of the poster plus the SP of every upvote. This SP should then be run through the logarithmic algorithm. This new value creates the post's weight (or volume, loudness, whatever). The chance of a post getting the top slot should be its weight divided by total weight of all posts competing for that spot. Randomization should occur independently on every device so that everyone sees posts in a different order, effectively creating a weighted search lottery.
Age of the post should also effect post weight (newer is heavier). Filters should be added to filter out dolphins and/or whales if desired. I would add a scroll bar from 1% to 100%. A filter bar at 95% would signify you don't want to see the posts of the top 5% Steem Power users. An age filter also needs to be added, because you know hackers have already done it, so the cat is out of the bag. The most popular ages people are looking for are between 15-30 minutes for curation purposes.
Steem Power should not effect the order of new or promoted posts. A promoted post's weight should simply be how much money went into the promotion or, even better, struggling minnows with low SP should have even higher promo weight (inverse log SP function).
Add Trials and Jurors
Steemit is in an incredible position to show that it's community is actually a form of micro-government. This is a world first opportunity for a website linked to blockchain technology. When someone gets enough flags to get in trouble, how do we know that they actually deserve to lose SP, and that SP given to the ones who flagged? With trials of course!
When someone gets flagged enough to be punished, allow them to double down, risking double the SP they would have lost, in order to start a trial. They can always choose to take their punishment (no contest) at a reduced fine. Steemit can pick x number of 'random' people (let's say 12) to review the offence. Jurors are paid the same (all SP) no matter what the outcome of the trial is (maybe allocate 1% of the blockchain). Jurors aren't provided with the identities of the other jurors, or even the defendant. Using majority rules, a vote decides guilt or innocence. Ties go in favor of the accused (or chose an odd number of jurors). In the case of innocence, punishment should possibly fall onto the false accusers if the vote of innocence was unanimous.
Multiple Reputations
Because there many different things you can do on Steemit there should be a reputation associated with each thing. A content creator is not necessarily a good curator, and a curator is not necessarily a good juror. Flagging and being a juror could be considered similar, and their reputations consolidated into one rep. By having multiple reputations we'll know who is good at what, and can assign weight accordingly.
Decentralize Decentralize Decentralize
Anything we can do to decentralize the blockchain while guarding against exploits will make this site stronger. We should be thinking about this constantly. For example, should whales be able to band together and simply like their own stuff? Perhaps the blockchain should be looking for bell curve distributions when giving out rewards. Keep and open mind and always be thinking about how to stop the rich getting rich and the poor getting poorer. Blockchain tech and greed do not mix.
Free to Play and Forums
We don't want people to think they have to pay to get their post viewed. Let's give everyone a free self-promotion every few weeks. I'm spending over $30 to promote this post because I believe in it, but the value of SBD is over $10 so it looks like I'm spending less than $3. I'll save this for another day though.
On this same note, I feel like I get more views and responses on just about every forum I've been on. We should add forums for people to ask questions, raise concerns, and get answers, rather than for creative content. I've hit the sidebar so many times looking for a forum. At the very least there should be a tiny one dedicated for site and community topics only... like this post for example.
Conclusion
I have high hopes for Steemit, but I worry that it's already too centralized, or that it will become so very soon. I fear that, because of this, there is already a conflict of interest to decentralize the block chain. Even though doing so would be good for everyone, people in charge may choose not to, and sell out the blockchain for short term profits. Please don't let Steemit turn into the Myspace of a Facebook world. If we don't constantly ensure that the blockchain stays decentralized, someone else will, and Steemit will be no more. Thanks for reading this wall of text. Stay classy.
I believe that the option to pay to promote posts actually makes this website less fair, because then people who have money will get their content seen and those who do not have the money to promote will not. It will be very interesting to see if steemit survives in the long-term because I do see some major flaws here and abuse of the system as well.
I totally agree with you on this one. Steemit is an awesome platform, probably the platform with the most potential ever. But yes, it does have major flaws. I wouldn't say its design is bad, but I've read some awesome ideas for improvement recently. Let's just hope that the lead developers will pick up on some of those suggestions.
I tend to agree with you. In the spirit of decentralization, the rich should not be able to buy their way into Steemit. Something has to be done. Perhaps double curation rewards? This would get more posts seen.
Not sure...
Some of these ideas are great. I dont believe in flagging or downvoting as both are heavily abused. You might be aware of @Bernie Sanders Aka @Randowhale attacking @Haejin. The whole idea of upvoting bots is making a mockery of this platform. No different to google prioritising paid content. At the moment I'd say the situation is so bad a new social platform will overtake steemit with ease.
118 views 29 views and $3.11 for a well thought out post is a shame.
I've resteemed it. Great if any one here could look at some of my posts and if you think they should be visible, help upvote them back from the depths a whale's censorship.
PS If I'm right, Steemit is a private company running an open source platform and it's not decentralised, meaning one day your fears might come right FB might just snap it up.
Excellent post!! I am really disappointed to see that you've only had 15 views so far, after 22 hours..
There's content on here with very little value, and posts like this seem to instantly get hundreds of votes and SBD payouts. What a total shame. It may be a good idea to promote this post in order to get more attention (for a day at least..)
Thanks man, I did end up promoting for $3 (aka $30). Honestly I've been here less than a week so I just need to keep on it everyday to gain some traction.
I've only just bumped into Steemit. Liked your post here - then found another by a 'aggroed'.
If we're permitted to refer within Steemit, you may be interested in linking up with 'aggroed'. Here's his post that prompted my thought you two might connect in a win/win"
https://steemit.com/steem/@aggroed/bringing-youtube-channel-owners-to-steem-let-s-make-it-worth-it-for-everyone
Nice. I'll have to check him out. You can also flag someone's attention with @aggroed
@edicted Your article makes a lot of sense. Hopefully developers will take note and consider the points raised. Anything which grows at the rate that Steemit is growing needs constant review and consideration of users' opinions. I'm very new to Steemit and also not very technically minded ...but really hope it keeps growing. I find it so inspiring at my age to be exposed to this technology and to be able to get stuck in! No placid retirement for me!
It's an interesting feature of this platform that I spend as much time getting my head around what's going on here as I do posting content!
Yeah, I know it seems like I'm trying to make this worse, but I'm actually trying to make Steemit simple. I want people to upvote good content and downvote bad content.
I don't want people to worry about when to upvote their own posts... sucking up to whales... worrying about curation trains. etc etc etc
rules need to be put in place to stop people from gaming the blockchain. these rules should be invisible to new users or people that dont care to exploit the system.
well said. D'you know much about algorithms, I think you might need to be able to put any advice in algorithmic terms to get noticed on this front!
Good idea. I'll definitely go more in depth on log soft caps in another post. I'll also be breaking up these wall of text posts into smaller blocks that are easier to deal with. That is harder to do when you promote a post.
These posts are good for new people like myself! Thank you!
glad to be of service. once i read the FAQ, white papers and blue papers ill be able to explain the site better.
There are definitely some interesting ideas here that I have yet to come across on the site and I 100% agree with your centralization concerns.
The issue is that there is little incentive for those at the top to really address these as they benefit from some of the lackluster mechanisms built into the current iteration of the blockchain.
That being said, ideas eventually make their way up the food chain, so I would encourage you to keep brainstorming. It's been awhile since I've seen a post with so many different ideas (related to Steem and Steemit) packed into it.
True, it all depends on how much vision the Steemit elite has. If they want this site to blow Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc out of the water they need to sacrifice short term gains for the opportunity to invest in fairness to get everyone to use the site.
Also, let's not forget that blockchains are open source. If we form a big enough 'political' group and threaten to compete with Steemit that might be all we have to do to get the change we want to see.
If witnesses were more open about their positions (as they are "representatives" of the blockchain), then the "constituents" on the blockchain could then push witnesses that supported them. These witnesses could block future forks on the chain unless desired changes are made. The amount of governance built into Steem is in my opinion one of it's most undervalued features.
While Steem is open-sourced, the issue is that the code is basically being written by Steemit, Inc. and most witnesses welcome their changes with open arms. I think we need more witnesses to push back against certain changes when they or their supporters disagree with them.
All you have said makes sense for me, I hope they implement it the following years or months
I don't think allowing downvotes/flags to actually take away SP is a good option. It would over incentivize downvoting and create a way for groups to get together and literally rob anyone. It'll create bandits on the system. Maybe if there was fare distribution and you couldn't purchase SP, it would be possible. But not in the current state. With that said, there does need to be a better downvoting system, and it should be marginally incentivized. But the biggest thing that needs to be solved is the flag war nonsense. It's a dangerous game that benefits no one and scares smaller users like myself from downvoting spam.
The trial and jurors concept I find interesting. Perhaps this would be the mechanism that allows one to fight a flag war and protect one's self from unwarranted downvoting abuse.