RE: Proposal to make spam less profitable
Do you think it will help with spam?
Yes, it will remove span once for ever, there will be just some bots that were left alone to spam because their owners did not took the time to turn them off, but indeed, that will stop spam. I got a more important question, socially speaking:
Do we really want this?
Let me share a short story:
When I joined Steem for the first time, there were a lot of things to learn, and I was not that fast with them, considering my limited time. As a newbie without any follower, I struggled so hard to get noticed, since my posts were completely invisible and nobody knew or wanted to talk to me. So I relied on the only thing that seemed profitable and okay to do: I started to spam. Comments like "Great post", "Nice cat" and so, brought me a little pennies that motivated me to continue to be active on this blockchain and with time I realized that it was not okay what I was doing and I stopped. Then with time, I convinced more people not to do this.
The moral of the story is more than obvious: If we stop the small rewards that people get from commenting, we may lose more people than we currently lose, and this is a thing that we must avoid. I have written about this previously and I still consider that one of the most important values of Steem is activity and traffic. Without that, Steem will never be as successful as it is today, processing that huge amount of transactions.
My personal belief is that before trying to fight spam which we still could do as a community using our flags and educating the spammers, we should focus more on the user retention, activity and good content discovery. When we will have these problems addressed, including bandwidth which demotivates newbies also, then I guess we will be ready to come back at disabling small rewards in order to fight spam, unless the community can not succeed to educate spammers.
As a second argument against this approach, is the fact that there are a lot of minnows who's posts are not worth more than $0.10. How that people would feel when in the 7'th day they will see that they do not get anything on their hard work and underrated and underviewed posts? This favors centralization of the Stake to the same big people who are able to make real money. Not to mention that if we put the trigger at 1$, only dolphins and whales will get some rewards.
I really hope that you don't mind, and that you will take a look at my sincere words right here.
What do you all think?
EDIT: @tarazkp came with the following idea:
Just throwing ideas... What if it was 'payment withheld' for the first few months like a trial period until someone passes muster (doesn't get flagged all the time as Spam).
Which basically means applying the increased threshold that you want to make, but after some time (like a few months I believe) from the moment that a new user made his account. This would be a better idea, but still, I don't think that this is the way to go, at least for the moment. As I said above, there are much important aspects to address and we should start with that and postpone as much as we can this kind of decisions which could affect the user-base of Steem.
A min cashout on post is not what is needed. Minnows / new members have a hard enough time growing on this platform as it is. If everyone wants this place to become more popular and have the whole community against spamming then something needs to be done about the vote values of all members. ONE steemians vote should not be worth more the 100's of other steemians vote's combined. This discourages new members once they sign up and after a week or two (if they last that long ) they give up or in some cases find another way to grow their account ( spamming ).
Another thing that stops this place from growing is the length of time it takes to make a free account. I waited over two weeks before being approved. I bet thousands signed up for an account here and because it took so long for them to get a response, they either completely forgot about this place or their acceptance email got lost among what-ever junk mail they may receive.
Find a solution to the above and watch this place grow, while at the same time the spamming issue will become more frowned upon. Allot don't mind it at present time due to the fact it's the way allot gravitate to so they can grow on this platform.
Great points. To add on to this here, every new user here trying the platform, learning it, and using it aren't all broke — even if they don't come with their investment in hand. Perhaps they want to see what it is like at the bottom first and what their hard work is worth. Usually, that is most telling. You know who your friends are when people care about you BEFORE you have something to offer them. And you can know how a system functions by the happiness of the lowest caste.
Exactly plus we will have the ones that want to build from nothing. What some whales seem to be forgetting is all the SP on Steemit is no good to them if all the minnows get fed up and leave this platform. Steemit needs minnows.
We talked about the plankton part before. You know what might be helpful to show the orcas and whales?
A statistic on how many plankton become minnows each month.
A statistic on new accounts is misleading. As is a statistic on registered users.
Engaged user is far more important. And making it past that plankton ⇒ minnows hurdle might be a good indication on how well the platform performs.
I think the percentages will show a large amount of sign ups leave the platform. A whale could always create a new account and start from scratch with no help from it's whale account or whale friends to see how hard it is to grow as a plankton / minnow.
I think the gentlebot has a sense of humor considering it's upvote was worth exactly $1.00.
Exactly!
Guys, in case you've forgotten, I stumbled upon a post resteemed by @jesta a few months ago which showcases an elegant mathematical solution to the spam issue, from @scipio:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@scipio/how-to-solve-spam-on-steem-introducing-userauthority
I agree, and have written about this recently on my blog. I think steem needs to put more effort into hiring curators with delegation. --like a much more serious initiative, traditional media feels less robotic... Cause they have real people curating as much as their fancy algos. And steem doesnt have fancy algos, so it needs people all the more.
With time the curators number has increased and it will continue increasing as the number of users on the platform also increases. I really believe that curation projects have evolved a lot and that they will keep evolving. You have got a nice point here!
Not sure. A plankton vote is mostly worth less then a Ȿ 0.005 — you can't be a curator before you are minnow. You would need look at minnows to make a prediction on new curators.
Indeed, but I didn't said that plankton will be curators. And yet, you don't need over 500 SP to upvote and earn curation rewards. I am more than sure that even less than 100 SP can still bring curation rewards and most likely that even under 50 SP, for a pretty good or lucky curator can also bring curation rewards.
On the other hand, as the number of users increases, the demand for curators will increase and most likely their number will increase. This is what I believe.
When I started I did make some in curation rewards. Then it dropped, had none for almost a month and as I just saw it's picking up again. Of course they are all absolute minimum Ȿ0.001:
But even that make me happy as it's more then 0. The motivation of even the smallest payment is important.
The curation rewards that you received were higher than usual because the price of Steem was pretty high => your vote was worth more. When the price of Steem got down, your vote got lower value which also reduced the curation rewards that you got. Now the price of Steem is rising again, which is a great thing!