Curation On Steem - Let's Talk About It
Some of you may know I run a curation bot for content creators I see putting in the effort. The bot upvotes around 150-200 Steemians every day for around 1-2$+ a pop. I'm a businessman, let's not get that twisted for a second. Don't think I don't know I can get 4x the amount of Steem on autopilot if I just sold my votes to the highest bidder. No, instead what I do takes a level of skill and timing. Finding great consistent content creators, then battling all the other curators is not the most straightforward task. It definitely doesn't fall into the category of passive investing. I am a hybrid, I become active when the need is, but optimizing time is always priority number one for me as it should be for you.
First and foremost, plenty of prominent Steemians and I agree curation needs to be increased, to ideally 50/50 with author rewards. This helps fight selling upvotes, as when you sell an upvote, the buyer will obviously wait until they selfupvoted, their mom self upvoted, their neighbor and their dog. Point is you will get ass for curation rewards selling your vote. Hell ppl wait a few days even to use the bot. So the ROI will be better to curation bots that actually upvote at the right time the right content as opposed to just getting bidbots
So bidbots should lose some business, vote selling should lose some business as well. Because even if vote-selling outperforms a good curation bot slightly, it will be enough to tip the whales to go curation because that helps the platform
People only sell their souls if it is a 4x return in Steem, but if it is just a 1.5x return, mmm I think it'd sway whales.
"Stakeholders shouldn’t grab more slices of the pie if we raised curation" .- They already have the pie, and they eat it too by selling votes.
One could argue "google/youtube etc. don’t even take 50% of earnings from the creator."
The one big diff between what youtube takes and what curators on steem take are the fact you will likely make more as an author with higher curation rewards. Good authors will be in high demand, and everyone will pile their votes on the best ones who create higher curation rewards and author rewards. Also, what they are referring to is an ad system; Steem isn't an ad system its a donation system setup with an incentive to give donations. but one can easily sell votes instead of donating them.
when the ad ball gets rolling on Steem, I expect the content creators to get the majority of the ad revenue.
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS
The entire economics here is badly misaligned.
The combination of linear rewards curve, low curation rewards and expensive out of pocket downvotes means the economy has reached an equilibrium where voting rewards a now used and accepted as staking rewards. So this means any genuine vote you give to someone else is basically an out of pocket donation under the current failed economic system.
This in turn results in content agnostic rewards and exposure, which would spell the death of any social media platform. Content is no longer being appraised and rewarded in accordance to one's subjective opinion of its appeal. It's a race to the bottom to either write your own bs and upvote it or write some bs that's just not shit enough to get downvoted and pump it using bidbots.
I've tried a number of times to raise this before, but a combination of compromised witnesses already heavily positioned to exploit a flawed economic system, perhaps deliberate sabotage and plain old stupidity has prevented any of these concerns from being addressed.
Only possible way is if steemit inc understood the importance of fixing the economy and dictated the witnesses themselves. But I doubt it'll happen. Short of that hopefully someone can see the potential of this system and offer to buy Steemit inc out.
The solution is simple, of all the people I've told it too, only Kevin Wong seems to be on board. Indeed, I'm usually the person he's quoting, including in his comment above.
You increase curation rewards to 50/50 to close the gap between bid botting and curation.
That's probably not quite enough to change the status quo, so you also need to hand out a small amount of free downvotes. Roughly 2 downvotes daily vs 10 upvotes will likely suffice. That way, there is at least a viable threat to upvoting garbage content as the ones that stand out will more than likely be hammered down now that there's no cost to doing so within limits. This will further push the balance towards actually curating content that you think is appealing in terms of rewards.
Finally, you can't downvote what you can't detect. If someone splits their self voting up into thousands of different account, the cost to hunting them down is too high. Therefore, a small level of superlinear is necessary. Even something as simple as half rewards up until around 5 steem, then linear after that will do. That way, you might as well curate properly than spam micro votes as you're only getting half the rewards under a certain threshold. After that, it'll be much easier to detect and downvote with their limited free downvotes.
Increasing curation, allowing free downvotes, and having superlinear all have downsides. This is why excessive measures such as 90% curation, as much free downvotes as upvotes, and n^2 are bad ideas. The minimum amount of these measures should be used in tandem. Together, they compliment each other to plug all the leaks in this sinking ship at the lowest.
With the current economics, the platform is completely self defeating.
I've been with you and Kevin from the start, I've even took the effort of creating https://steemliber.herokuapp.com/index.html - a new frontend that filters botted posts but haven't had the time to finish it.
I also voiced my opinion loudly for some time until I just decided to give up and join the crowd. Now after selling 100% of my votes for months now, I wonder is this how @ned wants his product to work? Manually voting someone from my own feed feels like I'm wasting my voting power, you're so right about that.
The reason I invested into Steem in the first place was the proof-of-brain aspect. Bots killed what was left of it instantly.
Ugh, this again. 50/50 is a tragically bad idea. Ive written about this in detail months ago so i wont be going in detail now. This would do nothing to vote selling. The vote selling services would just readjust the prices.
The superior solution is cutting author rewards once the DAO launches. That would go a long way to fixing the bot problem.
I know you and Kevin want to make more money but i think the bigger problem is that youre seeing vote sellers make more then you.
If vote sellers didnt make as much im pretty sure you guys wouldnt be advocating for 50/50.
True story.
This token economy is partially broken by too much Greed.
Like you said,
Some of witnesses are already running bidbots and making profit out of it. So as Steemit inc, I assume.
Seems like this is unstoppable.
Why? Because..
So.. If,
Well well..
What we gonna drink when the pool is dried out??
We need some enlightenment here.
I support your idea, @trafalgar.
50/50 Reward distribution would be a good head start.
Good points.
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might look at your account and untick /tick some witnesses
He’s too busy “ticking” his gifs and alt accounts on the 6th day....
sounds like what i should start doing:) left a comment on your steem vision blog
Agree with 50/50, especially if paired along with two other measures highlighted here to cover some other angles. Profit maximization should be expected out of anyone, hence it's best aligned with the behavior that we want to encourage, ie curation or content-reflectiveness.
Quoting off someone else who sees the same thing:-
Personally I like to post tweetlike stuff but not necessarily keep voting on them to keep up (or selling out to achieve the same effect). I'd rather try to lobby and support stuff that I like (edit for clarification: even if its just a tweet, not necessarily long form essays) while achieving returns that are as competitive (at least not as terrible as a 4x gap) through my own curation or through some specialized/generalized curation service.
Steem is slowly moving away from single content creators to communities. More Actfit's and Steem Monsters on the chain is where we are headed. Less solo authors. It is already a tough sell to tell business owners that they have to pay 25% Steem tax when other block chains like Tron charge much, much less.
If anything we should lower curation rewards to 15% to attract more business'es. Steem benefits way more with several business'es running on chain and working to draw in new customers than a few leech authors. I have never seen authors spend tons of money advertising steem .... Business will.
Could you explain why you think businesses will benefit from lower curation rewards? And what 25% tax are you talking about?
Curation rewards are a form of a tax and thereby are a limiting factor to business operations. Take Actfit for example. They are running an ICO on Steem-Engine. They are using their steem account voting power as an incentive to add value to their ICO. That value is effectively taxed by the curation rewards built into steem. So their 35% discount is actually only 10% because in order to get the value you have to pay the 25% curation tax.
If they did the same operations on Tron the actually benefit to their customers would be a lot higher. Not many business'es who can do basic math will choose Steem over other choices due to this.
I still fail to see how the 25% curation is a tax? That 25% goes right back into the upvotes pocket? If you are saying it is a tax vs who they upvote (still no understanding how you consider it a tax) then they could simply reimburse the 25% they earn from curation rewards back to the person that got "taxed". And if they curate well, they can make better money off the 25% then they otherwise could.
A tax is something that is taken from both parties and given to a third party, like a government. When doing a deal, if the 25% goes back to one of the two people in the deal, then they can work out an arrangement for that 25%, therefore it wouldnt be considered a tax. Maybe I am missing the barn door with your comment but thats what I understand.
And you can't compare Steem to tron. Steem is a app specific blockchain built around PoB concept. Tron is a general purpose blockchain where you can build anything like it's ETH. Steem was built for a set of task and cut out all the outside noise (IE Steem isnt trying to be a world computer or decentralized could storage for vids etc) - where as Tron is trying to be a world computer and is not limited persay. Just apples and oranges when talking token distribution model.
I guess we agree to disagree on this then. Not that it matters much.
It matters a little, because I'm reading the thread. Do you mean something other than curation rewards when you say "tax"? If you mean curation rewards, can you go into more detail about why you consider it a tax?
There will be no apps if people only try to game the system. User are the backbone.
Agree that profit maximization is main reason many are here. Also your other point was very important: “You get the behavior you encourage” there are no secrets in life only denial.
Agree
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When you first brought up your proposal, I think 50/50 reward change had larger support while other parts had some resistance. 50/50 makes complete sense to me. At the very least it should be tried by itself.
Much more, it would bring more investors to #steem. Curators would then find joy spending as much time as content creators because they will have a good ROI on their investment.
@ned, are you reading this? Listen to the userbase
Strongly disagree with the need to increase curation.
The system will be so easily gamed.
The concept of curation is cool when you look at it from the way it's supposed to work.
50% curation will allow whales to cast huge votes that capture the lion's share on a post and then buy votes to scoop most of the curation.
I imagine this already happens with 25%.
In my opinion all curation should be optional to be determined by the poster. They should also be able to apply curation to resteems.
"50% curation will allow whales to cast huge votes that capture the lion's share" - So? A person who invests a lot should get a more significant share of the curation over those that invest less into steem, esp if the curator finds the viral post first, nothing wrong with that. And the large SP hodler upvoting benefits the author greatly.
thanks for getting back to me.
Users already sell votes and receive slightly less money than the vote is worth. A big stake holder in control of a upvote bot can already buy votes and make a profit. By throwing down a big upvote first they make even more.
It makes zero sense that curation is forced on us in the consensus layer of the platform. All curation should be optional; to be determined if the OP even wants to be curated in the first place (and for how much).
There is even a
allow_curation_rewardsboolean in the steemit api that doesn't do anything. It looks like the functionality to disable curation already exists but is just on standby.I've been here 16 months and I have still yet to even see the equation being used to calculate curation rewards. It alarms me that the way inflation is distributed is so unclear.
https://steemit.com/curation/@edicted/curation-and-sbd-are-broken
Who controls visibility of the posts? The frontends of Steem. Theoretically payout has nothing to do with visibility. The entire curation mechanic is nonsense. This is coming from someone who came up with idea for raising curation to 50% all on my own. I've backtracked on a lot of my old ideas, as they were uninformed.
The reason for curation is token distribution. Without curation, Steem would be in the hands of a few people and never would have been distributed far and wide.
Bitcoin is distributed via miners with open access.
ETH started as ICO + POW; this was their token distribution model. They are going to PoS in which people lock up tokens to secure the network in order to get more tokens. While, not the best distribution model, since ETH has already been disturbed far and wide, they can maybe achieve a decentralized token distribution. However, unlike with DPOS (Steem's consensus model), token distribution isn't nearly as important to the functioning of the ecosystem because there is no stake based voting.
Now, enter DPOS. With DPOS token distribution becomes absolutely paramount, because tokens have voting rights for witnesses that run the blockchain. If you remove curation rewards what you are left with is a "shotgun DPOS" model which is basically a lazy PoS with voting rights.
Shotgun DPOS = Instead of passive token creation, you must manually upvote 10 times a day (vote selling/delegation to bidbots)
Removing curation rewards means removing the incentive to distribute the token and self-voting will be the 100% play in game theory.
A DPOS system with poor token distribution might as well be a centralized database. Sure, you get a lot of benefits of blockchain but the trust element goes out of the window.
Now, if you want to remove curation you would need to remove the upvote IMO because it becomes an obstacle. Just call it how you want it, remove author rewards and curation all together and have the inflation go to interest paid to SP stake hodlers. Make the staking rewards liquid so you can just donate to content creators you want. It is the same thing, forcing people to upvote with low curation rewards is just a janky system.
I'm for trying this. I know it will get gamed, but everything does.
One benefit I would see is that real users would actually earn from reading and voting instead of just posting, which could reduce the noise and allow for easier discovery of content. In addition, I think it might improve engagement.
Authors assume they would earn less, but I am not sure it wouldn't have a counter-intuitive impact and increase both Author reward as well as motivate curation.
Maybe it would be an easier sell at 40/60 Curation vs. Author.
I know I would buy a lot more SP and run more curation bots if curation rewards were higher.
What's the way out @Theycallmedan? DO we poll this. Don't witnesses have a say on this?
What about @Steemba?
I think 50/50 on curation is a better deal to grow #steem. I see more investors coming in with this.
Same here! 💪🏼🙌🏼💯
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50/50 is probably the worst idea i have yet to run into on Steemit.
Im for trying it though, just so i can say: Told you so.
Id bet anything it would be scrapped 1 week after launch once vote sellers adjusted and all hell broke loose. After that Kevin and Traf would have to leave STEEM out of shame, settle on Trybe or Minds, never to be heard again. lol
I can't agree any less with you @Whatsup on this. This will be a booster for #steem
I am one of those Steemians that are supported by your curation bot and I want to say a big thank you for that Dan. For those of us who decided to go fulltime steeming, support from curators like you make a huge difference and is one of the motivations to keep on steeming even though the prices have been very discouraging for long monhts. It also enables me to give back to the community as I have been more into hosting various contests and challenges lately. Thanks again for making all this possible. You have been such a bright spot in the Steem community.
As for the 50/50 rewards, we should definitely give it a try at least and see how it goes.
It has been working well over at smoke.io but the amount of users are much lower and it has been pushed from the beginning. I know that there people have been growing significantly because people who are staked like myself don't have to post to earn, just vote and have some fun.
Personally, I think it would introduce more reason to stake the F up and spread wider.
Curators on steem should be appreciated even more. I'm curating about 40 people for more than a year with @dcooperation , I don't upvote myself, I never powred down. But @dcooperation still small, it's really hard to make something from curation or content creation. One year of hard work and the vote is only $0.38 now. I never sold my steem power and I don't think I will do someday.
Some people are just holding their power and don't even curate or delegate. Some of them just left steem with letting that power not active there. It's really hard to keep curating and being positive.
But the good thing that more people are using now dapps and they are really helping people to be positive about steem. We need more people curating or maybe just find the active curators and delegate to them some power. People always can improve everything if they want.
But we still have a lot of opportunities here and that should make us all happy. I can even write a book about steem and the curation here. lol
huge points man. love the idea of 50-50. i think the rewards pool would get spread out so much more.
it would help retention for content creators as the more votes gets spread out across the platform. i know i appreciate the votes i get. but someone else might give up after a few months of creating without any traction.
50-50 is a great idea. would love to see it. thanks for the food for thought to end the week man.
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Whatever happens, I hope it happens soon. Starting to hear crickets out there.
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Agree! We should do it and try it out. I’m for it 😀
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“I’m a business man, don’t get it twisted” best quote of the day. 😂
I’m more and more liking this 50/50 thing. We should get the ball rollin’ and try it out. Maybe on the next hardfork, it can be implemented. 😎
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Ya, with blocktrades and the worker proposal system, Steem needs to HF that in the near future to implement, would be nice to get curation fixed then as well.
This one takes me back. To my mind, the original plan, n2 rewards and 50/50 curation was ideal.
I shot a quick explainer/breakdown on exponential rewards exactly one year ago.
For the record I think we've come too far in this direction to change now; and we'll eventually end up with the same result, as dapps add more users and dilute whale voting power.
Keep sharing this video Matt, it's a good-un.
A good point regarding n2 or n-something is the ability to pull down a farcically rewarded post with a small stake. Linear has killed that, and although there are flag schemes to try and pool down-vote SP, it's not really scratching the surface.
Yes, the take-home is that n2 gives you more influence (up or down), the bigger the current payout.
Right, thanks.
Would it be OK to link your video in a post I have planned?
Absolutely. Go for it.
Thanks. If it fits in nicely and the post deserves it, I shall :)