Steemit - Post age, votes and rewards should not be shown in the first 12 hours

in #steemit8 years ago


Currently people are influenced in their votes much more than just by the content.

People and bots use things like the age of the post, the number of votes, the amount rewarded to the post and even the author to decide whether to vote in the hopes of maximizing their curation reward. They don't take into consideration whether they like the posted content or not and it's all a game about guessing the popularity of a post.

Voting Age
Since when voting the age of the post matters. The first 15 minutes most of the curation reward goes to the author of the post. The 15-30 minute mark I believe it's 50%/50% and after 30 minutes most goes to the voters. This means people will delay their votes or use voting bots to place votes at certain times. If you did not have access to this stat all posts will have an equal chance of being up voted at any time during the first 12 hours.

Vote Count and who voted
Since the early votes get the most rewards people are encouraged to look for posts that meet a certain voting criteria. This includes checking if the vote count is low enough and if they have any well known whales voted on the post. If this stat is not revealed for the first 12 hours people will not be able to place votes based on existing counts, such as dismissing a post because it already has too many up votes or not voting on a posts because it has too few in a certain period of time.

Current Post Reward Amount
This gives people too much clues as to how a post will perform. Have whales voted on the post? Is it too high already to vote on this? Hiding this for 12 hours will eliminate this problem.

Author
Many people and bots up vote posts just because of the popularity of the author. This one to me though is debatable if it should be temporarily hidden since I also believe an author should be credited for his work from the start. However it will help eliminate blanket up votes of safe authors. If you do hide it the posts must still appear on followers feeds and people should be able to follow the author even if they don't know who it is to avoid them having to come back to do so later when the author is revealed. Authors might also circumvent this buy signing their posts. So hiding the author should probably not be done even though there might be some benefit to it.

Summary
The 12 Hour number is also negotiable and I merely chose a number I think will be a good staring number but other numbers may work well too. Hiding post statistics will prevent people from up voting posts purely on those stats and be more fair to all posts. People will actually have to read the posts to make a decision as to whether it's worth an up vote.