Where Are All The Voters? Why Manual Curation Is Going Away..
Steemit was founded on the principle that Manual curation by its users would make the Steemit ecosystem go round. Those that wrote or shared valuable content with the rest of users on Steemit would be rewarded for their time by other users voting for their article, which in turn leads to higher returns as well as pushing the posts to the hot and trending pages.
However, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. More and more, I’m seeing that users are selling their votes to bots (something I’m partly guilty of) although only 10% of my votes.
This leads to a huge problem. Most posts we see on the hot and tending tab are only there not because of their content, but because the votes were bought. I can send a 50SBD vote to a vote selling service and can be guaranteed to hit the trending tab. You may be thinking that this is great when you have something important to share, but it hurts the Steemit ecosystem.
Instead of users manually curating, we’re creating an automated system where anyone who pays gets an unfair advantage. We start forgetting about great content where authors spent their time to beautifully craft something for other Steemians.
Manual curation needs to be rewarded far greater in order to incentivize users of Steemit to find amazing content rather than the spam and trash that gets to the trending articles. A user can spend 500 SBD in a week and be sure to always reach the trending pages - which in my opinion is a flawed system.
What are your thoughts on automatic vs manual curation? Should something be done to change the future of Steemit? I’d love to hear your opinions.
This is just something normal on steemit now, people do not take it to be wrong. I wrote a post I took to be exceptional, I spent hours compiling it, yet I got just two upvotes from people whose upvotes worth nothing. The big ones keep upvoting themselves and the minnows are left out
Thank you for your insightful comment. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that feels that things could be different on Steemit. I’ve followed you. Don’t give up hope, you’ve got some wonderful content!
Thanks for the word of encouragement
Thanks for bringing up such an important topic. I really enjoyed reading your “rant” and getting your perspective on the topic. Even though I personally choose not to use any kind of vote buying service or bot, I tend to adopt more of a “freedom of choice” mindset. My value structure centers around the idea that people should be free to do what they want, as long as they are not harming someone else. I guess there could be an argument that people using vote buying services are draining the reward pool or not allowing space on the trending page for content that actually earned a place there…but I’m not sure I’d consider that “harm”. It’s a tough line to be honest.
One “myth” around using voting bots is that by hitting the trending page, you will gain more votes, followers and have further success on the platform. This may happen, but I honestly don’t think it is a good long term strategy. Many whales and dolphins with significant voting power are looking for consistent, quality content creators that they can support. If they run across your blog and like your content, but see that you self-promote all of your own content to oblivion – I honestly think that is a turn off for many of them. I could be wrong, and I would LOVE to get your thoughts on that – but it seems like if you want to attract high level votes from big users, using voting bots may actually DECREASE the likelihood that will happen.
Here's my issue with Steemit. Not everyone has the capital to achieve high SP. The problem is that whales don't manually curate since its easier to sell votes to bots.
Having 1000SP earned barely gives a $0.20 vote. That's the issue. We have too many new users with sub 500 SP so there's not much to go around. What does go around only goes to vote bots. 1000SP should give at least a $1 upvote at full power. This way minnows can upvote meaningful content. All I see are the same individuals in the hot and trending tabs that self vote since they dropped $5000 back when Steem was under a penny and have ridiculous amounts of SP.
Based on my own observations, even with a sizable amount of 1200 followers, I rarely get more than 10 views. This is a large discrepancy from what you'd expect from such a large amount of followers. I feel that people buy votes in order to get to the trending pages so that they're seen by hundreds of thousands of Steemians and in return gain more votes and followers. However, the big drawback is along the lines of what you stated regarding Whales wanting quality content. From my findings, buying upvotes of less than say 30SBD will rarely get you any other votes.
When it comes to buying upvotes, it's either pay enough to hit trending, or be forgotten. It's all in the way that Steemit has been set up. We need tighter communities where people will actually view the hashtags that are tagged, rather than just clicking the hot and trending tabs. I doubt too many people even view the new tab since half of it is spam.
In my opinion, SP needs to yield more rewards so that the new users can have meaningful votes. $0.20 for 1000SP at full voting power is too little. If the rewards were payed at a higher rate for lower SP users, it would dramatically change manual curation and the amount of content. As it stands, most of these high SP holders just sell their votes since its a passive income without ever having to even log on to Steemit. Why would they manually curate if they have 100,000 SP? Just sell the votes and make a sizable income.
Granted, not everyone is like this - I've seen plenty of high SP holders voting for all sorts of great content. My only observation is that since joining this site in October, the amount of voting bots has increased exponentially and the amount of manual curation has gone down dramatically.
Sorry for the long reply!
I completely agree, I am quite new to Steemit and now that I am starting to truly understand it, bc it was quite diff. for me, I'm finding out about the pay by the vote deals. Not that I ever expect to really make any money off of here, some would be nice and Im feeling like Im a day late and dollar short.
I guess the big players got in over a year ago when Steem was $0.10 - but still, I made over 1000 SP in 3 months so its possible.
Smart Voters Make the Most Money
Your votes can make you money. But the most recent changes to curation rewards mean that you won’t make as much from the type of voting you did in the past. What used to be an excellent strategy just a few days ago will be much less effective under the new version of Steemit. In fact, it just may cost you a significant amount of money.
Any suggestions on how to vote now?
True, the changes will make old tactics useless.
We need to get back to quadratic voting.
Been here for two months, at first I didn't really mind what I see on the hot and trending tabs as it all looks new to me. However this past weeks, it's getting more and more repetitive. It's all the same people with their charts and crypto analysis, people on dlive/dtube, even simple photography posts are boosted by a lot of bots.
I admit that I too used bots to have some little visibility here, being new sucks and without bots, people wouldn't just click on my posts. But there is such a thing as too much. What I think SteemIt really needs right now is common decency. If you think your post is really worthy of a $100+ upvote then so be it and go for the bots. Otherwise, keep it at a more tolerable usage of upvote post promotion bots.
Exactly, keep voting to a considerate level. I see some stupid memes averaging over $70 and I think to myself.. really?
It is hard for our contents to be recognized this days. We somehow resort to certain ways to be recognized and so we imitate those who bid. Sad but true. I can't think of those who have just been confirmed, start their blogs, yet don't know what's happening around. They wont have idea why they can't get any recognition.
Exactly, they'll think that their hard work isn't good enough which simply isn't true!
I agree so much. If I owned this site, I would ban ALL bots entirely. If the point of the site is to interact with each other as human beings in order to better each other, even financially, then it should be a fair process. Paying for votes is cheating the system. It's the lazy way out. There's really no other way to spin that. Laziness breeds shortcuts which breeds ways to corrupt a good thing.
I am new to steemit and I realize that a lot of people differ with my opinion, especially people who use bots, obviously, but it's disheartening to me to see what's going on.
I just assumed it was always the norm here, once I discovered the bots. But now I'm seeing that it's more common now than it used to be. I feel like it could very well kill the site eventually, at the very least it could deaden the spirit behind it, and alienate the legit participants. Thanks for this posting. I feel better now that I've vented! lol
You're welcome! We all need to vent sometimes. Exactly, let us find a way to curate others without the need for bots. It definitely is more common than it once was, and I fear it will only get worse as more and more bots and users join Steemit.
I used to hate the idea that people could buy their votes and take a spot in trending... but then I realized it is just "paid marketing", which is how the internet world works... I'm still a little disappointed in it because I'm an advocate of authenticity and organic growth, but I can't fight against the grain. Although, I have yet to purchase any votes myself. Not sure if or when I will decide to do so. I'm still stuck just hoping that people will genuinely enjoy my content and it will flourish on its own!
Sadly, Steemit will only gain more voting bots until it is not profitable to do so. I also believe in gaining followers and posting content the natural way. I hope that things change for the better in the near future.
In every good thing, there can always be pros and cons. Many of the upvoting bots are run by steemit witnesses for the purpose of helping minnows to gain attention for their articles if they don't have high steem power. Paying upvoting bot is explained to be like a marketing tool to get our article noticed. Nevertheless, I agree those who have more SBD can easily upvote themselves into trending. Little guys like me will need to be patient to get up there some day.