What if paid voting services provided truly passive ROI for their clients? Would this be an improvement for the ecosystem?
I was thinking about @etainclub's Ever Steem and my Saturday Science Spotlight and it occurred to me that paid voting services could harness beneficiary rewards in similar fashion in order to eliminate their clients' requirements for daily posting.
Pixabay license from Yamu Jay
Instead of demanding that their clients post every day in order to receive an upvote, the voting services could direct rewards to their clients in a fully automated fashion by making use of beneficiary rewards. It might look something like this:
- The voting service automatically posts one or more daily post(s) for organizing that day's distributions.
- These top-level posts are kept at low value, to keep them off of the trending page (hopefully... I'm not really sure if that's how the trending algorithm works).
- The voting service automatically replies to their own daily post with a separate comment for each client where the comment beneficiary is set to that client's account.
- After five minutes, the voting service votes on the reply with the appropriate weight.
Would this be an improvement for the ecosystem?
Pros
- It would (presumably) clear the clutter off of the trending page.
- It would free voting service clients of the need to post daily, providing truly passive returns.
Cons
- The rewards that are harvested by voting services cannot be used to spur legitimate content creation.
- The increased convenience of passive returns might lead to even more voting service adoption and less creative adoption.
- Overvalued content is still overvalued content.
Discussion
To me, the ideal thing would be for the top-tier stakeholders to take action and protect the ecosystem against the voting service abuse that is diluting everyone's stake and destroying the value of STEEM, but it seems that this is not going to happen.
So, reality sets in. The next question is what alternatives exist that would at least slow the bleeding? This suggestion might be a possible answer to that question.
In the worst case, STEEM becomes a defacto proof-of-stake chain - and we're already well on our way to that situation under current voting practices. In the best case, clearing the trending page makes a place where creative authors can actually enhance the ecosystem by drawing additional value from the attention economy.
Not sure whether this would be a net positive or not, but maybe it's worth thinking about(?).
Afterthought
A second option might be preferable - although it's not totally passive rewards. This would be to follow the Ever Steem method, almost exactly.
Maybe an author really wants to create content that's worth reading, but they don't want to be stampeded into posting every day.
For that author, the voting service could simply post a comment each day on the author's most recent post or comment, set the beneficiary to the author, and vote on that comment.
If this second option is coupled with some sort of quality control, it might even bridge the voting services and the attention economy.
Ultimately, it seems to me that neither of these methods should be very difficult to implement.
Thoughts?
Thank you for your time and attention.
As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".
Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.
Pixabay license, source
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Your suggestion resonates with mine 🙂. I believe that such changes are an easy way to take a big step forward in increasing the proportion of quality content on Steem.
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Ah, right. I had forgotten that post. Very similar. The main new things here would be the use of beneficiary settings, instead of transfers, for distribution and hiding the votes below the top level to (maybe) get the low-quality content out of trending.
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I suggest you create such a bid bot 😁. I think it is not difficult from a programming point of view. Every bot creator has a profit from this. You could direct this profit to create a curation account to support talented authors or simply burn it. Such a bot would be more useful for the blockchain. You could combine this bot with your other ideas, such as fifth (I could have made a mistake with the number) generation bots.
Of course, this takes a lot of time, but it could be an interesting experiment. 🙂
I like your ideas in terms of reducing low wquality contents to earn from self-voting services.
There are too many low quality contents on steem these days.
On EverSteem, I'm considering implementing minting or hunting good quality contents inspired by your last post.
A user can hunt a good quality content and share the rewards from the EverSteem voting. The purpose of this feature is to collect all the good quality contents on steem and make them trending!
And aftger reading your post, one thing came to my mind which is that data on Steem might be good source to train LLM or AI-agents. For that I don't have a detailed plan right now, but I feel that I can find some connection between Steem data and LLM.
Cheers!
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This would be great. Aside from the overvaluation of low-quality content, another challenge for Steem authors is the short payout lifecycle. Anything that helps move votes and views from low-quality current posts to high quality historical ones could help with both challenges.
My unlikely but not completely crazy hope is that Justin Sun will give some LLM-based agents a substantial stake of Steem and they could be convinced that the vote-bots are bad for the economy and be willing to take action.
They probably don't need individualized comments, they could just set the beneficiaries appropriately on a single mega-voted post.
There are pros and cons to trying to make the abuse less visible. In the long run I think transparency is one of the core values of blockchain tech, so rather than paper over the problem we're probably better off leaning in to that and letting the ugliness be visible until someone tries to fix it.
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That would be entertaining. It sounds like Tron's first pass at LLMs was less than optimal, though.
Yeah, I was thinking that too. Not sure how many beneficiaries you can put on a single post, but they could definitely reduce the number of posts.
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