RE: My HF21 after thoughts and impressions of new steem trending page
If you haven't seen it already, I think you will find the discussion that I've had over the last couple of days on the announcement of one of the big failures of HF 21 to be interesting.
I'm not exactly sure how anyone fought that Trending would improve under the new more linear reward architecture. Seriously, it takes even more emphasis away from being rewarded for creating new content and puts more emphasis on trying to get the right vote bet in on content that you know is going to be voted up by a whale. Simultaneously, it makes less rewarded content (and the vast amount of content on the platform is rewarded at less than $20, as you know from running the numbers on a regular basis) even less rewarded, meaning that it is ultimately even more pointless to vote for anything except for what you know to be one of the big topics that the whales want to talk about.
Anyone who sat down and thought about this change in architecture for 15 minutes in relation to what people actually do would know that it will lead to less diversity of content, less creation of content, and more racing to try and get the first vote on content which has no relation to quality but which you know big players are going to vote on.
And in the midst of all this, they gave away free downvotes – a mechanism that requires you to deliberately go find content you don't want and downvote on it. Most reasonable users don't find that much content that they don't want or that they think shouldn't be rewarded because the whole point of a social network is to go out and find content that makes you happy, not spend your time digging in the mud for crap. The only thing most users are going to run into after they settle into a set of feeds are comfortable with is comment spammers – and that is about the smallest fry you can ever imagine trying to swat the swarms of.
No, the underlying ideas are essentially broken and of the incentivization mechanics are getting exactly what they are designed to get.
I am neither thrilled nor excited.
As you pointed out before the HF, however, it is too soon after this particular round of debacles to see how the economy is going to shake out. I don't have a lot of hope, but we'll see.
Judging from the market value of STEEM, the people with money to play with words really excited about the likely payoffs, either. You would think there would be a little pick up if the big players figured there might be a gain after the fork. And yet – that is exactly what we didn't see happen.
Considering that the big investors have the most to gain and access to inside information that the rest of us don't come the steadfast refusal of the market to get better, even on a short-term basis, told me everything I needed to know.
oh @lextenebris I do fear, as always, you are correct. However, having not enough skin in the game means there is not much I can do nor say. well I can say what I want but you know what I mean. I'm an optimistic person, and I have been pro-change and pro steem. But the lights are fading. Proof of brain, I feel is failing with a Z..... we are told this is untrue and the aim was to distribute steem, for which it is doing ..ehemmmm......other concepts such as proof of attention would also prove difficult. I would love to be able to offer some sort of solutions or alternatives instead of moaning, but I really dont know what the best way forward is.
In the meantime, enjoy the vote, because I would rather vote great comments and engagement than a flag to redistribute from small sp holders to large.
"Proof of anything" is perhaps not the right approach to understanding or building out a social media-focused platform. Maybe you could go with something like "proof of interest" because that is effectively what users do simply by interacting with your platform and engaging with content that they enjoy, but then you have the bigger question of "what does that interest mean?"
And really, that shakes out to "what should we do with that signal from the user?" On other more successful social media platforms, they take that signal and use it to try and surface more content which the user will be as interested in, which provides a positive feedback loop which keeps the user engaged with the platform because they are getting something they want. Incidentally, that happens to generate a useful profile about that user which helps target advertisement they also might be interested in and act as another source of revenue for the platforms. I don't see that as necessarily a negative because it's an inevitability of actually doing the job well. You will build up an idea of what that user wants and likes and what you do with that information is on you.
"Proof of brain" never worked. Never. It was never a proof of brain anything. It never proved anything. There has been entirely too much automatically generated content which has been greatly rewarded on the platform to believe at any point that the signals users were giving to the system identified a thing created by a brain. That is not only true of content, but of curation activity.
So we can toss that one out up front.
The Steem blockchain has an inherent disadvantage, one that I've written before about at significant length and I'm sure you've read that post even though it's about two years old at this point. The basic assumption of how things are valued on the platform is top-down authoritarian. Proof of stake (i.e., the more SP you have the more anything you do matters), coupled with what is essentially a might makes right means of determining what is "most popular," just ends up with large stakeholders determining what's popular or at least what is seen as popular by the system, and with very little that the vast majority of small stakeholders can do that makes a difference to their personal experience.
I have suggested some fairly radical things in the past, but the bare minimum that Steemit Inc. needs to do is to decouple the personal experience of the user on the blockchain from this idea of "what is authoritatively popular." They have done their level best to avoid doing anything that reflects the user as an individual on anything that they touch. They have pushed all of that down to application developers, most of which have been infected with the idea that an authoritarian system still defines what is best for everybody.
What needs to happen is a decent, modern featured social network platform with what is considered the very basic set of requirements to retain users, i.e. the ability to self aggregate in common communities for free, quick account creation, a system that learns from what they like and dislike and goes out of its way to try and surface content they're going to like, all of the basics – with the Steem blockchain underneath to act as a secondary "minigame" if you will for adding value by letting people engage in token exchanges.
Or, more succinctly, somebody needs to treat the social media platform part of the thing as the most important part, way more important than the cryptocurrency part. Because nobody needs another cryptocurrency. They could use another really reasonable social media platform that is distributed, resistant to censorship, and all the rest.
If you want to go see someone at least trying to do a good job at it, go check out Gab – which in six months has gone from being its own microverse standalone server to building off Mastodon, working into being a distributed federated server network, implementing entirely new community features into a platform that never had them before, and generally – despite some technical issues which they are still fighting with – did so in under six months.
That is how you fail better faster at a rate that lets you shake the bugs out of the system at a terrifying rate and be completely open source on top of it. You don't even have to appreciate the kind of content that tends to be there to recognize that they are doing the kind of platform development Steemit Inc. had the opportunity to three years ago and could've had those millions of interactions the whole time.
(Though if you're interested in the kind of writing I do on that platform, you are more than welcome to come and check it out.)
I would much rather vote for great content, great comments, and engagement that makes me feel like I'm getting somewhere and spend my time hunting down content I don't enjoy in order to put flags on it. I think that accurately represents how most people would like to engage with things. Not acknowledging that is one of the core failings of the blockchain as it currently stands, and it's one that makes me the saddest.
This.
I need to go look at Gab. I have been looking in detail at the papers on other social type blockchains trying to come up with solutions and best combinations. I must say, Lino have done a good job with dlive( although I'm sure there are some flaws)
You should definitely take a look at it, but be aware it is not related to a blockchain. From a technological perspective, they are coming at things from the "semi-distributed anti-censorship" technology side of the world, and both as developers and as a community that gives them a very, very different feel.
(Not the least reason being that a lot of the population is built up of people who for good reasons or bad have been displaced/kicked off the more mainstream social media platforms, so they tend to be rather extreme examples of their social personality type. As long as you are fully aware that you're going to fall into that mess, you can find the people who are interesting to follow what they're saying and feel comfortable being liberal with blocking people who are Holocaust deniers, Q-anon conspiracy geeks, hard-core feminists, or what have you. I tend to be a hard-core freedom of speech maximalist Libertarian when I write about political and social issues, so I accept that I am where I am.)
The problem with DLive is, surprisingly, not the technology – even though the last time I tried to use it myself it blew up spectacularly and was a complete failure. It's been about a year since I bothered to give it a go. No, the problem with DLive is that they are trying to compete in a space where the network effect is one of the most important things about a platform and may have not much in the way of traction to make that happen. If I start broadcasting Oxygen Not Included right now, and play for six hours straight, I might have one or two viewers who aren't really interested in what I'm doing, they are just changing channels. If I do it on Twitch, I'm going to have eight or 10 viewers, the bulk of which know what game I'm playing and want to see what I'm doing.
That is a big deal for streamers. It is very difficult to drive traffic to a longform stream that isn't already on the platform. I respect what they're trying to do but my expectations are low.
At least, however, they are trying to do something.
Your post as an observation of what went on is going on, and all the reply's does show that some people understand it. I have very few down votes to my name, maybe two or three I handed out in two years for plagiarism. I do not see my habits changing very much when it comes to down votes, I look for and read things I like, I'm not an investor, I am a user, I see no purpose in looking for things I don't like, and down voting them, just in the hopes that stuff I do like will get better rewards.
I read your linked post, it is nice to see someone else who gets it.
:-) looks like only the large stakeholders are really the only ones going to change their ways, after all its already in their nature to protect their interest, so they are not changing their nature.