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RE: Compact Broadcast Node: Low Cost Infrastructure to support Keychain, Splinterlands, Steem Engine and Future Apps
Downvoted in response to be what appears to be unnecessary vote buying. A worthy update like this would probably get plenty of organic votes and exposure. Why not give it a chance?
I'd be a complete and utter ass hat if I didn't put a brief explanation to why I downvoted. I've done this on all other posts I've downvoted since HF21/22.
I've always maintained that trending is the first place new people are most likely to make a judgement about steem. The dogshit trending we had has improved since HF21/22 but there is a big hurdle to get over for steem to start bringing more new people to the platform and that is the steem-centric content that dominates trending.
I showed this post to my girlfriend, who is reasonably technically proficient, and I said to her '"tell me honestly what you think about this post? Would it interest you and encourage you to join this platform?" To cut a long story short, she didn't understand a word of it and said it put her off immediately. I barely understand about 30% of what this post is talking about and I've been on steem 2 years.
This is the only reason why I downvoted it. I think everyone needs to be judged to the same standards, and I'd ask the same question of my better half about any steem-centric content that was boosted to this extent. By the way, I have explained to her much of how steem works to my level of understanding so she isn't clueless.
What I mentioned above isn't the only consideration I have when looking at trending content and thinking about using a downvote, my biggest consideration is the boosted shit posts. But they are getting less and less, which I think everyone can agree is a very good thing :)
Agree with most if not all of what you said there.
I'm just trying to get it seen on trending. I stopped buying so it would be 4th or something. Many of my posts these days earn $6. Just don't think it's terribly likely to get the eyeballs I'm hoping for without promotion and I don't think promotion is bad a thing even post EIP. I think this post and this work is a really nice addition to the ecosystem.
That said I also expect a few flags. It'll be ok either way.
Everyone that ever made a post here would have liked their post to be seen on trending. When you make that call yourself for yourself beyond your stake you reduce the chance of others to get there organically, you break proof of brain and you drain the reward pool.
You should know better as a witness.
Downvoted.
Maybe steem needs special reward pool + special trending page only for witnesses, so we can peacefully shake hands and do our thing
I disagree about eyeballs. You have followers who would upvote (including me) since yes it is a good initiative, and things have changed a lot on trending itself. The barrier to trending is a lot lower (and the fewer bought votes are used the better it will get).
Agreed and flagged by a minnow
Posted using Partiko Android
Hey smooth, witch-hunting people that promote their posts is not going to be as effective as it may seem, a decrease in bot promoted posts is not going to bring the masses to Steem, that in itself is not a value proposition. It may actually serve to alienate more people, however If the content that was promoted is trash then that is a different story.
Don't agree with the "witch-hunting" name calling ;)
Promoting is fine. But the amount of the reward pool used for doing so still matters. People can find ways and places to do so that don't engender opposition from people such as myself who understand the systemic problems which can be caused by too much promotion.
Trending is a scarce resource. The posts cycle maybe every 12-24 hours in most cases, which means there are maybe 5-10 slots per day at most (depending on screen size and UI of the viewer, but obviously higher is better). People can take a step back and be a bit circumspect about whether their content is not only useful, but really one of the 5-10 most worthy of exposure on a given day out of every single post on the entire platform. I would submit in many cases the answer is no, especially if other stakehodlers don't agree with the merit enough to give organic votes.
Finally, too much promotion undermines what we are trying to do with encouraging people to invest in curatation initiatives. Not only does it reduce the reward pool (for both curators and authors) but it makes curation less effective and meaningful. Do you honestly believe that every one of those 5-10 daily slots should be filled by promotion, leaving none to be filled by honest curation? My second question would be how many posts would you say are currently being heavily promoted daily and is this a healthy balance? I don't think so, not yet. So some push-back is healthy.
So, no, I'm not flatly against promotion, in specific special cases where the promotion is exceptionally needed and useful, but it can easily be, and has been, drastically overused. Until that is no longer the case (or it becomes clear that EIP did not work and the dominance of paid voting and self-voting will remain the norm), I plan to continue applying some downvotes to encourage change.
#NewSteem on, mate!
My take is there is not much demand for the trending real estate, I've seen days go by without much new stuff on trending. If new content wants to appear in that real estate space then it will have to outbid what is there, which is healthy, creates a demand for SP or demand for Steem to purchase votes. I do agree with you that we don't want every post on trending, certainly not in the top slots, if promoters ensure their post is just off the trending page but high enough for them to still get their message across then that is great, perhaps this post was overpromoted. Promoting is good for a kickstart to get visibility and then be pushed up further by curation consensus. Promoting yourself to #1 takes away an opportunity to discover what organic votes your content might get and thus a valuable opportunity to gain user metrics and sentiment is lost by overzealous promotion.
Everything in moderation is fine, I don't agree with-over promoting myself, but I do feel promoting in general is more liberating than a case where users would have to beg and plead whales in multiple private DM's to let their content have a voice.
There's not much demand because trending is entirely filled with other advertisements and garbage that get paid to be promoted as well
The more you bid, the greater your exposure and the more money you're up in total after your post pays out. On the other end vote sellers can expect returns in line with full self voting. Think about it, is this sustainable for a healthy content discovery and rewards based proof of brain system?
If there were no demand then sincere and success-minded Steemians such as yourself and @aggroed wouldn't be redirecting the reward pool simply for the purposes of visiblity!
The time it takes for Trending to refresh is a function of both the parameter of the algorithm (which is why Hot refreshes faster), as well as the amount of votes, largely paid votes, piled onto the posts. With less paid votes being misused for this purpose, it will cycle faster.
But to the extent it doesn't cycle that fast, it means there are even fewer slots. Now you have to argue that one's content being pushed up there is among the most worthy 3-4 posts on the entire platform in a day (or top 5-10 for the first couple of pages). Occasionally, this may be true. Often it is not.
We will have to simply agree to disagree. Paid voting is not healthy for Steem. It undermines curation and the value of Steem as a mechanism to give rewards to worthy contributions.
As I said, we agree there is a role for some promotion, but treating the biggest reward payouts as being a matter of "outbidding" is unhealthy.
We didn't double curation and introduce free downvores for no reason (and further introduce a non-linear curve which has a heavy cost on smaller reward-earners and communities, but necessary in order for EIP to have a chance to work). That would all be completely unnecessary if we were happy with the paid voting model and 'outbidding'. We did it specially to shift the emphasis away from vote selling and toward curation.
The dichotamy of vote selling vs. begging is a false one. I would suggest that you redirect your considerable entrepreneurial skills away from pure vote selling and toward creating vehicles for people to get their content in front of curators and vehicles for promotion that don't also involve redirecting rewards in an unintended and unhealthy manner (for example, perhaps we could have an ad-network where people can pay for visiblity across Steem-related UIs, just a quick brainstorm).
We actually have planned to add advertising to Ginabot notifications where people can purchase ad slots which come in after x notifications, Ginabot has 8000+ registered users.
The problem is actually vote apathy, you can put out all the great tools you like but if whales have busy work lives they won’t use them, i think there were some curation centric websites that for the life of me I cannot remember the name, but likely never used. Whales are few on Steem and not enough to cater for the demands of a growing userbase, there are lots of active minnows but their votes aren’t worth much, even cumulatively, the distribution on steem is not great so curation defacto won’t be great.
I also caution against heavy downvoting and reducing trending values drastically, people came to steem in their droves when trending posts were $1000 plus, with the hopium that they would get a fraction of that, right now with the highest cream of the crop being $150 let’s say, new users won’t even stand a chance to get anywhere near, post promotion at least puts new users on equal footing with insiders and people who know the system, the power to get visibility is in the hands of the user which is what crypto is about, empowering those without a voice, not subjecting them to an oligarchy that determines according to their own bias whether your voice is worth something or not.
The other narrative I subscribe to is that Steem is no longer a one-trick-pony as it was in year one, authorship and curation is not the only use case, we have games like SM and nextcolony, steem can be used as a stateful backup of your wordpress data and gamestates too, we have forums that use the rewards model as tipping rather than for visibility etc.
The Steem community should be focussing on efforts to rather build business grade wallets, easy multisig, hardware wallet compatibility, merchant integration, debit card integration, gift cards, referrals/affiliate programs etc. Focussing on downvoting to me is a race to the bottom by alienating people that could later have been buidlers and by making steem look mediocre with lower post values on trending.
Edit: There has been some user sentiment discussion in slack where it seems users don’t want their content value to be determined by the “rich people”, that is quite archaic if u think about it. I think Steem should try push in the direction of Proof of Human and individuals having equal weight in voting content and number of human votes determine value and visibility, if we can solve that problem while still keeping identities self-sovereign then steem would have solved that which giants like twitter cannot and would once again put us at the forefront of innovation.
The way to get (some) higher values is with less promotion. Let the occasional exceptional post get voted highly by the stakeholders. The more that is spread out by a lot of people buying promotion every day and the more the total pool is drained by people buying promotion every day, the less an exceptional post will be able to earn even if it does get exceptional support.
All of the other stuff you mentioned about multisig wallets, theoretical proof-of-human models, etc. its all great but has nothing to do with voting on the reward pool. I'm all in favor of Steem not being a one-trick pony (which is why I'm totally in support of applications like Steem Monsters which don't rely on the reward pool at all, will be in favor of strong SPS proposals to work on multisig and such, etc.), and I would add to that promotion models other than using rewards (including some of the ones you mentioned), but as long as the reward pool does exist, and is a signature feature, we should also make the most of it, not abuse it for promotion.
Whales with busy lives can delegate to curators instead of vote-selling.
Or just not vote, which distributes influence to those with less busy lives. The less prevalent it is for everyone to monetize their votes, the less critical it becomes to monetize all of yours in order to keep up. Just being a passive investor relying on Steem price appreciation is a lot more viable. Which is a good thing because for most of the world of investors out there we want to attract, that's what they want, not needing to participate in some convoluted scheme involving vote selling.
Just added to my last comment
'Trending' literally means 'being the subject of a trend'. Trends involve multiple people supporting / doing something. If you put posts into the trending section yourself through payment, you are denying the real function of Trending. Vote buying, in that sense, to reach 'trending', is like designing a new hat and then paying people to wear it.. then saying that your hats are important.
That is assuming that trending is 100% efficient in terms of wisdom of the crowd and whales aren't already voting their friends or self-voting their alt accounts to get to trending. In an ideal world the trending page should be as you describe it, but in reality bots give the average user a fighting chance to get noticed.
Also see below my reply to @hobo.media
The value of trending depends on the quality of content on Steem. As the quality of content on Steem improves people will flock to Steem, and the Steem ecosystem will raise in ranking and awareness online. This in turn improves the value of getting on trending.
Bot services provide an immediate use case for STEEM/SP, this is true. But focusing on Steem being a place for high quality information sharing is a long-term focus, which the bot services can, and arguably have already stifled.
Human curation programs are the ideal way to move forward. This can create jobs for real people, more than just curator jobs too. If quality becomes evidently more important than quantity, people may hire and compensate professional writers, editors, translators, artists and musicians to improve the quality of their content, and they might begin using STEEM directly for those services.
I don't agree that quality content is going to be a silver bullet to bring the masses, I think somewhere along the way Steemians got brainwashed by that, in reality if I put up a website and put up the best content earth, yet did not market it or have affiliate programs, pay influencers to push my website, hire marketing agencies, have good onboarding funnels etc, I can have all the good content I want but it will never be a successful website.
It takes more than just quality content to make a website successful and become a household name, usability is also another factor, this mindless drive to get good quality on the page is unlikely to help the Steem price, if we get Pewdie Pie or Lady Gaga (the real people) on the front page, now that sells!
Also who is to say that content being promoted is not quality, I too am against promotion of rubbish quality, but if it is not rubbish then I don't have a problem with it being promoted with realistic values that are not over the top, it also stimulates activity on Steem, where there is currently not many value propositions.
I agree on the non-necessity of downvoting posts simply because they've been botted. Promotion is a perfectly valid use case for bid bots. In fact, it is the original use case and it is meant to increase demand for Steem Power. Excessive use of bid bots or to just maximize ROI, the byproduct of which is the pushing of unworthy posts into Trending is grounds for relentless downvoting. But this particular post contains valuable information to those people who are not @aggroed's followers, too.
In practice there are only a few slots per day on the top of trending, maybe 5-10. Yeah everyone thinks their post is the best thing since sliced bread, but if other organic curators and stakeholders aren't voting for it, there is objectively a reason to be skeptical. So just having some "valuable information" is not enough.
I also think it is a valid use, but I find it hilarious that those who have been providing blind upvotes in exchange for money are suddenly against blind downvotes.
If they don't like it they should "counter" the votes, that's been their message to the community for 2+ years.
They should take the lumps and brainstorm ways to make their businesses less destructive to the community and content creators.
I have say that I have changed my opinion after having listened to arguments for downvoting bid botted content in Trending. Boosting posts to Trending should always happen at a financial loss. Paying people for putting stuff into Trending is madness because it leads to the prime real estate on Steem being filled with garbage. Trending should have the best organically supported content on Steem to draw eyeballs, which is when advertisers would actually want to pay to put their ads in there.
I think it was @nonameslefttouse put it perfectly:
https://steemit.com/life/@nonameslefttouse/the-state-of-the-nonameslefttouse-address-another-month-down-with-some-time-off-in-between-for-thinking-purposes
The general consensus for using promotion services now is to decline rewards. Bot services are not quality oriented at all, they upvote what they are paid to upvote.
There are better ways, such as the new Curangel project, and the HoboDAO project that we're building is a decentralized contest curation system that allows a group of human curators to decide the top 5 daily posts submitted to the HoboDAO for review and curation rewards.
Contests and human curation services are ultimately a lot better of a system. However, if the bot services wish to continue, the community is recognizing that it is acceptable if rewards are declined. Ideally, #NewSteem should just embrace new human curation programs and give up on the idea of bot services, which is a point many outside commentators have criticized Steem for having.
I think setting @null as beneficiary to burn a portion of the promotion rewards is also an interesting idea, in such a case since burning is involved maybe a 50% burn would be acceptable.
why don't you screw off? None needs you here - your super negative and you make me angry.
Thanks, it's not necessary though. Smooth is literally one of the dudes I'm thanking for his help in this post. It's his stake he has a right to flag whatever.
I don't think less than a week of functioning uptime on hf22 is enough to change the culture. But honestly, I haven't seen a smooth vote on one of my posts in a year. If he's voting again, even if it's a flag on my current post, this is a major win for EIP.
Problem is that people are leaving STEEM because of the downvotes and these STEEM justice warriors don't get it.
@kawaiicrush is the latest example that I saw today, having a hefty downvote battle and now leaving. He has taken 4k Steem to Blocktrades already and another 6k will most likely follow in a few days. This is real, their purpose does not justify real damage that is done by burning active members.
If I see one every time I search for it, damn.. how much of a % can I see? Nothing...
In life, we can have 100 reasons to stick with something and still one reason against it might be enough to turn around. So @smooth it is not o'right what you do. This is not about being right or wrong. If you have a neighbor in real life, you can choose. You agree or you evade, you don't warship anything, unless you want one of you to leave in the end - in that case, go downvote anything you think he does wrong.
I really don't get where this idea is coming from. In my personal life, I've been voting since I was 10 and had to choose a student representative. Never ever was there an option to downvote, no never. Vote or don't vote. Now we can fight corruption and abuse with downvotes, B U T none should play justice warrior, that will most likely emergency evacuate anyone who gets targeted/suppressed.
Steem is better off if kawaiicrush leaves 🙂 and if you don’t know this, then you are speaking without even taking 5 secs to look.. which is not beneficial.
If you don’t understand downvotes and why they are important, then you don’t understand the rewards pool. Rather than raging, take a few moments to educate yourself before attacking others.
There are no justice warriors here, there are people using up and downvotes (based on their stake) which then reaches a consensus and the inflation is paid out based on that.
Downvotes are part of a healthy ecosystem and this one is valid.
I totally understand the system and the goal that is behind that. What I don't do, is to mix up strategy and empowerment. It's the perspective of the power balance in this system that makes it dangerous. The way I've seen downvotes generally used in HF21/22 is fantastic, but I don't think it will stay that way.
The Steemians with the biggest stakes can now enroll a lot of regulation, as they could have since a very long time. But until now they would do that very selective and not based on systematic, or maybe even fully automated rules. Only with the free downvotes, it really makes sense to build downvote systems that strive for a better STEEM environment for . . . . B L A N K S P A C E . . . . .. they can choose for whom.
My father told me once, the best political system in the world might be a perfectly just King. I still don't believe in that. People have different needs and opinions and the people should be the real King.
If you really want to have a giant ecosystem where big STEEM stakes do good for everyone, there might have been less intrusive ways of doing that. Maybe limit the maximum size of upvotes/downvotes or create even smarter curation curves that can perfectly adjust to soft parameters, improve the UI to showcase extensively good content based on upvotes per views or general overperformance of an author. But who am I to suggest such things, I'm sure you already get the idea.
10000% agreeing, downvoting is never useful
Upvotes and downvotes are powers people receive for staking on the Steem network. No one has the authority nor the right to tell you, Smooth or anyone else what they can or cannot do with their upvotes or downvotes. Voting is a matter of subjective stances on issues, and there is no official policy nor should there be an official policy for what you can do and not do with your votes. If there was an official policy that was enforced by a single entity or a power circle, curation would then not be a decentralized system indicating wide community sentiment.
I 100% agree about one week not being long enough. I expect this process to play out over several months and I'm still not sure what the outcome will be.
As for my votes, I had steadily delegated out (nearly) all of my SP over the course of HF19/HF20 as I saw that voting was largely useless and it became a pay-to-play dominated system. I kept a token amount undelegated to be able to engage on comments, downvote spam or clear abuse, etc. That's why you didn't see my votes, because I mostly wasn't making any.
Since HF21, with the hope that the culture does change, I have undelegated most of my SP (some is on long term leases and my current plan is to let them cycle out). I plan to vote/curate/downvote. But if I see that the culture is reverting to one of paid voting and self-voting then I will go back to delegating it out like everyone else (self-voting would be another option, largely economically equivalent, but too much trouble for me personally).
Where this goes? Easy to tell:
Whales or their account holders will use advanced downvote tools to censor the whole rest of the network, just as it pleases them and for free. Meanwhile, the trending page is full of Like-Train posts.
Sounds like a good platform to be on, right?
At least some of us can now not only search for content to upvote, no they can also search for contet to downvote. That's a cool new hobby.
Hard no. The graph does NOT show the number of users, it shows the number of accounts which is not even close.
It also includes Steemit in the whale section, which does not vote (at least not for the undelegated portion of their stake) and is entirely irrelevant and misleading.
The categories are also pretty arbitrary and all of the bars are large enough that even modest changes in the cutoffs would start to shift a lot of the mass of one bar from one of these arbitrary categories to another.
And finally, none of this really matters for the purposes of proof of brain being preferable to paid votes. As long as stakeholders reach a consensus on payouts which align with value added to Steem then the system works. Whales have at least as much incentive to support that sort of alignment as anyone else. The people who don't have this incentive are vote sellers and self-voters who make more personally by undermining the system for everyone else.
It is good to fight abuse in all possible ways! Anyway, it will not stop there. Downvotes will take their independent purposes and we'll see where that goes. Especially considering automated downvote bots.
My organic range is so small, you could automatically silence how many accounts of my size, just with your free downvotes? Let's say if I'd posted every other day once, what would be the number?
and if you think I'm talking out of the blue, you might be a bit wrong at least.
I can't play NC anymore, because attacks are too cheap. It's Vietnam all over the place...in the very same week that HF21/22 implements free downvotes and systematically downvoting just starts. Trust me, it's scary for small members of the community.
You might wanna check out my latest post about that: https://steempeak.com/palnet/@manniman/9-weeks-of-nextcolony-game-over-now
This is the result of adding my name into an automated system and then forgetting about it. So I'll leave NC behind and I would have to do the same with STEEM if my name would end up in a downvote list.
I don't know anything about nextcolony but if you don't mind how about a brief intro and tell me why you can't play it any more and what if anything that has to do with HF21/22. Thanks.
The attacks just burn my earnings, so I can't progress anymore. They are made by an automated attack bot, and I can't dodge them efficiently. My fault at this point is, that I'm too small to fight that guy and now I will never ever be big enough.
The same could happen with all my author earning if I'd end up on a downvote list. Also, just a single person could be enough.
It is both fascinating and ridiculous to see top-quality post like this which enlightened me a lot, got downvoted. I don't know. Perhaps those precious free downvote power can be used against real reward pool raper like Haejin' non-stop spamming.
Unnecessary vote buying or not, that's controversial. For excellent post like this, that's totally fine in getting some reward from vote buying as well as the organic votes. Compared to this controversial bid bot issue on an apparant high-quality post, there are tons of spam posts raping the reward pool hard, why not combat those instead?
Of course, if your mission is solely for “educating on correct use case of bit bot” or “bringing justice to the Trending page”, down voting this post might make some sense. But again, I don’t see a problem for good post like this getting more reward and the Trending placement is utmost deserving. We should use more focus on the real damaging source of reward pool, those little but frequent spam post of all kind from all sources, that the spammers would not pumped to Trending so it can be shot down as an obvious target.
IMO you are obsessing over something unimportant and uninteresting.
Everyone gets 2.5 free downvotes per day and is entitled to his or her own opinion on how to use them.
My opinion was to use it here, yours is not. That's really all there is to it.
Vote buying is itself a systemic risk. It's marginally worse if done on bad posts but still bad no matter what. If you don't agree, that's fine (although it indicates some lack of understanding of the economics), use or don't use your downvotes how you see fit.
rep of 69, keep going to enforce your moral judgment to everyone and you'll be at -1 soon
@netuoso what did I do to you?
No words just downvotes, that is how STEEM roles now? You don't like my opinion, so you censor me by downvoting, great job 10/10. @ned Take that to your next meeting.