Thank you so very much for this huge piece of information about a very hot topic.
I have a very hard time believing that "A curating bot or a curating human serves the same purpose and essentially does the same work for the platform. " I have seen so many posts with low to mediocre quality getting upvoted by tons of bots bringing down the quality of the platform to the eyes of the people coming through this platform. Though, there is an obvious incentive in voting, the quality of the vote itself brings about questioning in relation to the inherent quality of a post.
Not manning this vote, offers a huge space for bots to bring forth in the rankings much lower quality at a much higher rate than any humans could do. Therefore, the general resulting effects of the bots activities on the platform must greatly vary depending on the quality of the bots themselves. Nevertheless, I still have a tough time believing that a bot could attribute due quality to poetic writings and literary styles making use of parables, myths, poetry itself.
From here, it is obvious for me that curation guilds are a paramount essential in our virtual ecosystem platform here and if we are to rise in sustainability, we'll need to allow for the curation teams to focus on this matter. The crews working on curations for the moment are highly pleasing and bring about fantastic results for us all, I can't stress that point enough. They equally double up as watchdogs for our platform as well as they have learned by now to read between the lines as well. I am so glad to read "What users are seeing as a “problem with curation” is mostly a problem with the distribution of stake, the voting algorithms, and the tiny user base." I see this daily and can only agree with you. If more knowledge, a clarity of understanding how the platform works was palpably there in the user, new comers would have much less worries about the matter of justice relating to the distribution of stake. This fear in us humans comes way before we actually became humans and it is still persisting within us all. Justice on this matter needs to be openly exposed and, in our situation here, more crystal clear explanation, schematics, educational cartoons and rudiments of that fashion would go a long way into introducing these concepts to our new users.
I can only support the switch over to "the algorithm to n log(n)" as a very beneficial change for us all, and especially the people found within the system that have much less power. Yet, this new way of doing business also allows for the higher stake holders to still have a decent amount of leverage over the curation as well, which I found in itself very healthy as it tends to naturally promote quality and sustainability of the platform as well.
What a powerful paragraph: "With better distribution and less incentive for piling on, and an increase in overall curation rewards, a focus on quality curating should result in better returns for human curators. The incentives for holding SP would therefore be greater and may even increase demand."
Thanks again for a fantastic write up, dedication to quality, sustainability and a very healthy virtual platform. All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
To be fair, I have seen many (subjectively) low-quality posts being voted by human curators to the top of the trending page. So it's not exclusively a bot problem.
Of course not. The current curation bots can't judge the value of content in any humanly subjective way. But that's not their purpose. Their purpose is likely one of two objectives: to predict where the most value can be gained among existing posts and to vote on those, or to simply vote for specific authors and/or to vote at a specific time on a given post. Either one consists of a human element in programming them and they both perform work for the platform. So in that sense, the curation is being done and is helping to achieve the goal of linking content/pages.
In my opinion, the far bigger issue is the human voting with larger stake - and attempts to distribute for the sake of distribution or to hand out rewards based on "consistent effort" rather than actual evaluation on post quality or potential popularity. In that regard, I would disagree with you on the necessity of guilds. If you missed my post last Friday (don't remember if you commented or not), it was about this very topic.
I pretty much agree, although I'd actually prefer to see less involvement from so many whales trying to "distribute" rewards. There's an argument to be made that the less the whales get involved with voting, the more influence all other users will have. The trending pages would likely be vastly different from day to day if the voting was done entirely by the smaller stakeholders. It may even allow for actual and organic popularity to emerge among the user base. I realize that this will likely never happen - and I don't have any particular reason why it should happen - but it would certainly be an interesting experiment to say the least.
Well, thank you very much!
In almost every case, those bots were front running shitty human whale curators who upvote the same author 100% of the time (for reasons of their own, which i won't touch on).
There are maybe 10 honest to goodness people that have a measurable effect on reward distribution. and afaik, all of them are people, not bots.