I have a discussion question that most likely, devs need to answer but it is used for thinking purposes for people to learn what they can about the system they use.
At the moment there is a flagging session going on against a high reward, prolific poster which essentially and unfortunately has to happen and probably should have happened before. But, would a split pool have stopped the situation from getting this far?
About a year ago, there was a 4 post limit per day but this was scrapped at the hardfork because comments started to get rewarded and because (afaik) comments are seen as posts, it was no longer viable. Then a straight line replaced the curve on voting value giving power equally distributed relative to stake.
What happened was a lot of spam posts and self-voting of comments. Decentralized, self-governed freedom at its best - power to the people.
The goal is to make spam posting and commenting less incentivized, increase quality of posts and comments and reward curation at a higher level. The way to develop the health of the system is to encourage creation of quality over quantity and support curators of quality over quantity.
Here is a proposal to be considered and shot down.
- Split the pool into comments/post rewards 15/85 percent.
This will include curation for each. this has an obvious advantage when it comes to limiting the drain of self-voted comments or, highly voted comments as it would cap the total possibility.
Comments are important but, very few are worth more than a couple dollars, let alone several hundred. This also makes comment Spam less lucrative as the potential comment rewards go down. On top of this, it ups the competition for good comments, not number of comments.
- A degrading post return.
Now, this one has some problems I am not fully understanding of but it has to do with SMTs. It would work wonderfully (at least for an experiment) at Steemit but the introduction of SMT's using the same blockchain rules may prove troublesome.
How many posts of quality can you create in a day? How many memes should be possible to post looking for a large bot upvote? Instead of completely capping the numbers, degrade the payout value and the degraded portion will return back into the pool. The posts can be numbered for a 24 hour period that says which it is in the series and what is the return.
Post 1 - 100%
Post 2 - 100%
Post 3 - 100%
Post 4 - 80%
Post 5 - 50%
Post 6 - 20%
Post 7 more - 10%
That is a relatively heavy, degradation but an average account posting on Steemit can't really create much more than 3 or 4 quality posts a day. I post 4 to 5 a day and it is a massive amount of work. And posting many quick to produce things like memes should come with a penalty factor considering the effort involved.
It should however cut down on a lot of the posts created, making discovery of quality easier and make people spend more time on less posts rather than trying to play a volume game for rewards on lesser posts. This may mean higher reward averages per post.
- More for the curators
Now, that is something but I will throw something a bit more into the conversation to mix it up a bit.
What if a percentage (25%) of what went back into the pool was added to the curation of the 100% posts? Would this mean that people would be more willing to curate the first 3 posts and if this is the case, would the posters spend more time developing the first three considering that curators are likely to vote higher as they will get a better curation percentage? For the curators, that is a massive bump in their curation and they are much more likely to support the first 3 posts significantly making the posts that come after, even less attractive to create considering the degradation also.
Would people curate more, would it stop spam?
This is just for discussion purposes and perhaps if some people who understand the blockchain and how SMTs will affect or be affected by changes upon it could answer or clarify, that would be warmly welcomed.
At the end of the day for at least the moment, the goal is to create an SMT-friendly environment as that is where the future of STEEM currently lays. People need to remember that and continually remind themselves of it. STEEM is not STEEMIT, Steemit is an interface and gateway only.
Now, shoot it down as best you can and build upon what is left. These kinds of posts are less about creating changes and more about getting people thinking about how the platform operates or, could operate.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
I think these are good suggestions, however, I can't help but feel we're wielding a sledgehammer(s) to crack a nut. I'll get to that in a moment.
Proposals like limiting the vote value on say the first 4 posts sounds sensible as 9/10 people can't proffer up more than 4 quality posts a day (heck, most can barely manage one!). The problem here is that there are/will be people out there who can manage more than 4 posts of generally great quality - why should they be penalised? Surely we want the best quality content and not arbitrary limits across the board.
Turing to curation, I find this all a bit of confusing area but one thing that springs to mind is that this would likely favour the whales more in terms of vesting power etc (wouldn't it?) i.e. they would have more to take a slice of if the rewards went back into curation, so this potentially wouldn't go down well generally.
Ending on my starting point, the crux of the problem seems to be self-voting and this needs to be addressed first to my mind. What about some cap on the number of self votes or a faster degrading vote value on votes on our own content or a cap overall on a self vote value e.g. $100, degrading over a 24 hr period?
Sorry if I went off topic at the end but you hit on some fundamentals that I agree need to be sorted.
This would penalise me quite heavily
It will favour curation, yes. Whale or not. Everyone seems to want to get whale votes but aren't very interested in them benefiting from providing that vote. People forget that many earned their stake either in the real world, working or by being early adopters but, it generally was earned.
This has no effect whatsoever on alt accounts doing the voting.
It will just shift value to alt accounts.
And it shouldn't. Also, further apps that might be built on Steem, including shorter form content apps like Steepshot and Zazzl - would this count toward the 4-5 posts? Doesn't seem to align with the more frequent, conversational tone of those apps.
Fair point.
Okay, but how does limiting number of posts change this? Just set up alt accounts in both cases...
As I said in the article the limiting of posts doesn't actually work because it has problems but it was included as a thinking area. It doesn't work for a number of reasons including things like zappl. It keeps coming up though because people confuse Steemit with Steem. They have comflicting desires. They want steem to the moon as long as it is on their terms.
What is of interest to think about here though is actually the splitting if the reward pool. But, no one so far has mentioned it. Most likely because they focus on the parts that affect them now.
This seems like a good idea. But then - there is other side to why people comment.
Many new users including me - don't have the following to start with. They rely on the community of influential users.
Hence, they need the push to go on. That is the reason - I contribute more to comment than to my post.
Because my post might get 1 or 2 views. But in comments, I am guaranteed to at least 5 to 10 views. And if I am lucky, many more users might see the post.
So there is that.
Good points Taraz...
Let's be honest, what's on the trending page?
Still the same people, mainly topics that are interesting to only a few.
Usually on the Internet are trending mysterious puzzles, surprising stories, funny animals, politics... Maybe some sidebar with posts recommended by someone would be a solution?
Trending is something different.
Normal crap, you want that?
I've been saying all along that votes between accounts should have diminishing value for each subsequent vote.
So if you post 10 times a day, then by all means, but you can't just upvote yourself or get the same whale to upvote you and expect significant profit.
That would also limit the impact of bots.
It seems that no matter what is tried, there is always a new scam. It is like any virus checker, always a step behind.
Yeah, any loophole in any system in the world will be exposed where there is financial incentive. But some loopholes are glaring and need to be addressed.
agreed
What about a cap on the quantity of the reward pool you can accumulate?
I don't think so. Some people genuinely deserve higher rewards.
Niel Strauss posts irregularly, but his articles are amazing quality and they get rewarded accordingly. Limiting the reward would give people like him less motivation to contribute here.
I like this. It's worth a try. An increase in the proportion of curation rewards of the entire pool sounds like the way to go. Improving content discovery is a topic in its own right and has relatively little to do with curation as a whole.
Yes, and I think that lowering the volume of content is a step toward making things a little easier to find.
While that is true, content discovery is mostly difficult because of the lack of tools to access, classify, and sort a sufficient number of posts.
Anyone can build an interface with better tools, I think Steemit inc is focusing on the backend at the moment.
That's right. I saw Ned Scott's video blog post on focusing on the back end. It is a wise strategy.
Not for a social media platform it isn't.
Steem the blockchain is much more than a social media platform. It is the data layer of a host of decentralized services and STEEM the cryptocurrency. Anyone can develop better front end tools even as we speak. And I believe Steemit Inc. will get back to improving steemit.com as soon as the work on the blockchain is complete.
I wish it would be that simple and people finally understand that quality should be over quantity..but it seems like a madness with no hopes to control it..but hope more people will read your post and understand something :)
It's because, like Taraz said, the high colume players on this platform maybe aren't too self-critical since they have no repercussions for their actions. They earn money by doing litteraly nothing (spam a bit, buy a bot to pay them back, rinse and repeat) and they don't get punished for that. Their vision is on money and not on content creation. That's a paradigm we already need to shift in the early phases of this new platform. It's sad, but it's a very honest and real comparison to what happens in the world generally. Only thing we can do is keep informing people in the hopes they'll act differently if they ever get in a position of power. The system is flawed at the moment and the answers aren't clear. I have not enough knowledge of this platform yet to find the answers either... So it's always interesting to read and think about posts like this, on that point I fully agree with you :)
This is for many people but it is largely an incentive problem as to how they go about earning.
Curation is the place that those with money can best those without. More money for author rewards is better. Perhaps weighting rewards based on reputation?
It is funny but this system would likely provide much more to authors of quality and more to the curators of quality.
Reputation is becoming increasingly irrelevant as because of bidbots, It can be bought.
Curators should get a incentivised for a higher return, currently, the average is between 15 and 20%.
It's impossible to flag bad curators as that hurts everyone else's content. However author rewards is a different matter.
Comments are posts, and are treated the same on the blockchain. So technically, there is no way to differentiate comments from posts (except by with more advanced technical coding, which I honestly don't know if it's possible to perform at the Steem core protocol level).
I do like the idea of comments having a lower reward pool (I believe there was a fork a long time ago splitting comments / rewards pools, then a subsequent fork removing that split -- I'm not sure what the lessons learned were at that point??).
Decreasing the potential value of comments so drastically (or arbitrarily) might be a problem. I'd like to see some analysis from someone like @paulag or the #bisteemit group to look into what the current split between post rewards and comment rewards are. Setting a "cap" on comment rewards, would also therefore "cap" the post rewards.
This could results in an unexpected consequence where Comments are provided with an INCREASE in value as opposed to an intended decreased value in the future (and vice versa with a DECREASE in Post values).
I do like the idea, but I'm not sure that I like the execution portion with the 15/85 percent split. I feel like there would need to be completely different rules for voting on Posts, and completely different rules for voting on comments, and completely different rules for apps that are built on the Steem blockchain that are not part of the "Steemit" culture. For example, Busy.org would be in the same category as Steemit.com, and other similar sites; Steepshot and Dtube would be in different categories - possibly their own? possibly the same?
Just some of my thoughts...
I've noticed something else as well. I've noticed that a lot of my upvotes don't come with a reward. Could it be because people will vote for anything, even when they don't have any pool of reserves? Or could it be that they are after curation rewards.
I'm curious about this as well.
I think the suggestion of splitting the reward pools has merit, but it could also damage newer members as that's how they make most of their money. If their posts are only getting a few cents, they're going to need the comment income. Granted, if there was a big enough pool, it could just be cutting down on the money that was paid out in the $100s for quick comments.
I like the idea of degrading the payout at set levels for posts. This makes sense from an article standpoint, but remember there are apps like Zappl now that are supposed to be like Twitter. That means comments 400 times a day to let us know you saw a bird. "Oh, it flew away!" "Wait, there's another bird." I'm not a huge fan of twitter. And there's Steepshot that's supposed to be like Instagram. Normally a picture and not much else. If someone posts a few of those, then they won't have a tier left for an article.
The point is that those are considered posts. In my opinion, the apps would be better off on another site. Maybe SMTs can take care of that. That would mean the articles that are left would be the ones subject to the degradation and the plan could work. Who is going to want to publish another article if they only get 10%? Spam cut.
Daily Learn some new from your post. Love to read it.
Flattery on steemit will actually get you nowhere and makes you sound like you're begging for upvotes. Please stop.
Very nice post and wonderful written sir, upvoted ☺
Please try again. Comments should add value to the post and in this case should be used for discussion. https://steemit.com/education/@tarazkp/value-added-comments I have downvoted you so that the comments which me, the author and others like will stay at the top as I am interested in this topic.