RE: Steem post promotion: Past, present, and future
I commented on your comment on the post that inspired this one before reading this post. So my other comment pretty much says what you already know - sorry about that!
In closing, I'm also in full support of the idea by @steemcurator01 to reward people for setting a benficiary through use of the @null beneficiary setting and #burnsteem25 tag, but I think we should also consider resurrecting the /promoted feed.
It would be good if the 2 ideas/approaches could work together somehow so that people don't feel the need to set a 25% beneficiary as well as transfer SBD to @null. This could be as simple as sc01 visiting the /promoted page and people like us increasing awareness (i.e. including a note / comment / "promotion" at the end of each post to say "I am promoting this to steemit.com/promoted via a SBD token burn - learn more (with a link to more information)).
One thing is niggling away in the back of my mind (which I'd be interested in your thoughts on) - although we'd be helping to increase the price of the STEEM/SBD tokens, users of voting bots (for example) won't be "sacrificing" anything and could "disproportionally" benefit from our community spirit 👈 This is badly articulated but hopefully you get the gist.
#burnsteem25 would support the analogy of "75% of something (i.e. a potential sc01 upvote) is better than 100% of nothing".
/promoted posts will only work if we create an audience.
I'm getting good at repeating what you've said aren't I 😆
Another interesting distinction is that with the /promoted posts, the same person can promote the same post multiple times. As a result, "bidding wars" would sometimes develop between people who were competing to stay at the top.
For that reason, high stakes curators might want to vote late in the payout window, in order to let people bid the articles as high as possible. Once a whale vote is thrown, the bidding stops, I guess.
I've not tested - are the bids added together, so a bid of $1 on top of an already $1 bid would set it at $2?
My thinking was perhaps the opposite - once a whale vote is thrown in, there's more "money in the pot" to bid even more (or invest that money in their next post).
IIRC, yes, that's how it works.
I agree that a whale vote would lead to future promotion, but on the present post, I guess it depends if they're motivated by visibility or by rewards. If they're seeking visibility, then you could be right.
It's been interesting watching the activity over the past few days - snice sc01's comment. There are already over 300 posts that have @null set as a 25% beneficiary but almost no posts that have "promoted" their posts via some SBD burning.
What this says to me is that people are using the #burnsteem25 hashtag solely to get the attention of sc01, knowing that if the vote doesn't come, they've not "sacrificed" anything.
I continue to watch with interest 👀
I agree. The "out of wallet" requirement seems to be a big barrier to entry.
Any idea where to find documentation on how to write a browser plugin? I'd like to have something that highlights posts in my feed if they have a null beneficiary set or if they have a non-zero promotion cost...
I can't imagine that it would be very hard, but I have no idea where to start.
Update:
I figured out how to create a browser extension and use it to find the beneficiary and Promotion Cost strings. Now I just need to figure how to do something useful with it.
Ah, I was about to reply and just saw your update.
If it's any help, I've got a webpage hosted that shows all of the active authors/posts which have beneficiaries set, what percentage and the pending payout. I don't want to share it publicly but if you have Discord, I can share it with you there - the-gorilla#4289
It sounds like you're half way there. You should be able to navigate the DOM from one of those strings and implement some inline styles - you might not even need to do any DOM hopping and just replace the string that you've found with the exact same string + some inline styling.
I wanted to work on this plugin so I can make "promoted" posts stand out visually in other feeds besides /promoted and #burnsteem25. It's interesting that it has the opposite effect in #burnsteem25, too. It's easy to tell if someone forgot the beneficiary setting.
It's looking good...
I think that "forgot" should be in quotes 😅
Not quite what I'm going for. There's a recursion thing going on that I need to work through. But, I'm getting closer. ;-)
Update: And closer still:
I totally agree. I am doing both for my posts today, just to play around, but I'm definitely not going to make a practice of it. I'm even thinking that 25% might be too much to ask from most authors. It will be interesting to see how things shake out, but, I definitely think that curators should support both initiatives.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that too. I don't have a strong feeling, but one hope is that maybe some of the high-stakes investors would rather switch to an initiative like this in order to see their holdings grow in value, instead of relying on incoming distributions that are constantly whittling away at the value of their starting stake. It's hard to predict, though.
Yes and no. I've had this conversation offline but for those authors who earn nothing anyway, the potential of getting a sc01 upvote - even a small one - far outweighs the small sum that they're currently earning. They could burn 25% for 100 posts and if they get 1 hit, they'll earn more than they currently do.
This is starting to show in its usage already. At the time of this comment, 124 posts have set @null to a beneficiary of 25% (or greater for the fat fingered 52%-ers). The posts will either earn nothing (and therefore burn nothing) or get an sc01 upvote and burn something.
I've read some thoughts that the only way to make this meaningful is if Steemit (as the largest sole stakeholder) burn a large quantity of their STEEM. Which I'd be amazed to see happen.
Something's better than nothing and since burning STEEM / SBD was probably the first conversation we had, I'm surprised to see it happening and wonder if it's a fad for people chasing upvotes which won't last. (It's definitely people chasing upvotes but relies heavily on Steemit for it to be sustained.) Is this the "new clubs" initiative being unofficially launched?
I also don't see Steemit burning their stake, but I don't really agree that it's necessary. Cutting inflation is a nice start, but IMO, what is absolutely necessary is a front end that really rewards people with higher visibility for post promotion. If post promotion comes to provide a real benefit in terms of building an audience, that's when it becomes possible to actually reverse inflation.
I also wonder if it's a fad. We'll see how long it lasts. I have tried setting a null beneficiary on my own a number of times over the years. We even had the Share n Burn community, but I've never seen it get traction like this before.
It shows the power of an sc01 comment. A lot of people watch (and often reply to) every comment so as soon as something's said, it becomes a new "rule" or "initiative" - most people don't care what the objectives of these initiatives are or what the Steemit team's trying to achieve, they'll just do anything to get a vote.
You were the first person who ever mentioned the idea to me (what feels like a long time ago now) and having just watched my "burn ticker" cross the 300 posts mark, the rate of uptake continues to increase.
Here's a baseline. I'm anxious to see what happens to the top graph on Sunday when the beneficiary rewards start rolling in. (SP & VESTS as curation rewards to @null on top, wallet SBD transfers to @null in the middle, wallet STEEM transfers to @null on the bottom)
The first payouts will start on 29th May 5:30pm GMT.
Total Pending Rewards stands at $3631.417 at the time of me writing this comment and presumably it'll be 25% of the 50% author rewards so roughly $450. The number of posts is increasing (we're at over 100 posts per day) but the bigger upvotes are mostly clustered on the 1st day.