Steemit has problems. I have The Grand Solution.
With the invent of @yougotflagged among many other changes to this platform, the ongoing talk of the town is that there are two, huge, gut-crunching problems with Steemit.
- Spam
- Self voting abuse.
Let's identify the problems for the sake of any new readers, feel free to skip ahead.
Spam
Spam is tricky and will basically never go away, but thankfully we have @steemcleaners to deal with that to some degree. There's still accounts like @monitorcap which post automatically every few minutes, as well as comments, and many users who somehow find it logical to copy news about iPhones every day without crediting their sources.
Until humanity gains a few IQ points, this will likely remain.
Self-Voting abuse
Basically, people with high amounts of steem power either upvote their own stuff that gives them inflated value, rather than sharing the value around to the minnows and everybody else, or they rent out their power for a small fee, in a way that is only profitable if the person who rented it upvotes themselves silly. This means people are incentivized to post 1-sentence posts followed by 20 bot accounts commenting on it with 'thx' or 'gd', all of which is upvoted 3, 4, 50 dollars or whatever.
Sometimes you have a post that maybe took an hour to write and instantly receives $250. @yougotflagged was born to fight this, bringing value back to the reward pool, and it gets a bit of income from people upvoting the daily posts sharing what has been flagged.
But as long as huge whales like @blocktrades and groups like @minnowbooster exist, aside from huge programming overhauls, this is always going to be here and possibly get worse the more whales catch on to the lucrative scheme.
But here's my far more elegant solution
All my solution needs is for whales to hear about and be convinced by this business opportunity.
There are a number of growing, trusted curation teams out there. As of today, I am part of three of them in some way or another: @curie, @steemstem and @ocd. There are plenty more.
These have been around a while and have been doing nothing but a selfless service to the website by manually choosing valuable posts and upvoting them anywhere between $5 and $100, depending on if they were democratically nominated, or the level of quality or whatever.
I can tell you, being in these teams alone, ignoring the other language and country teams, a huge chunk of steemit is covered. If you post anything in Science, Tech, Engineering, Math, steemstem, medicine, chemistry, biology, physics, geology, psychology and so on, SteemSTEM has it completely covered. OCD trawls the feeds with a huge team in multiple languages. What great tools!
Simply, all whales need to do is put all their delegation into these groups, the ones they trust, and they will do the upvoting on the behalf of the community.
But the whales still need to profit
So all that needs to be added is a premium service. Rather than offer a service that guarantees an upvote worth more than they paid for, offer a service that puts them on a list guaranteed to be checked, and doubles the voting power the given curation team provides.
So if I pay $5, for example, SteemSTEM could slam 30% on my post rather than %15.
BUT ONLY IF IT PASSES THE QUALITY CHECK
If they pay $5 for the teams to upvote 1-sentence spam, they waste $5 and it goes straight to the VP of that curation account.
A whale could even offer double-premium, or triple-premium, $50 for a 100% vote, for example. In the meanwhile, the curation teams get the curation rewards, or get a guaranteed upvote on their own content as they see fit, or any similar benefit.
To Sum Up
What this means is that curation teams will grow exponentially as demand grows for their upvote services. Nobody pays for the upvotes but they can get priority. Nobody can spam or abuse self upvoting because it's entirely manual, curation teams profit, whales profit, minnows profit.
Spam and Abuse is simultaneously de-incentivized while striving for higher quality posts is strongly incentivised.
The only thing missing are clever people creating a system or app or group or whatever to organize the priority premium upvotes and the weight of votes to be sustainable, but with enough whales' backing, a 5% upvote could potentially be enough for the most premium of service.
Can anybody actually see anything wrong with this idea? I'm admittedly ignorant to the ins and outs of what goes on in the background so this could, somehow sound stupid. Please let me know if so.
It's been running around in my head and I've been pushing it to silence for over a week now. If you like the idea, please resteem it and catch the ears of whales. Perhaps we can save this site once and for all, and in a way that doesn't require months of dilly-dallying while the smart computer people figure out computery-number things they all disagree with each other on!
Cheers.
It'll be difficult to deal with the butthurts if people paid for the premium-queue and don't get any votes in return if their posts don't pass lol. Anyway, curie has been operating without providing any curation rewards back to the delegators. It all gets distributed back into the ecosystem instead.
Stake-holders would do well to realize that delegating SP without any strings attached will lead to a meritocratic curation ecosystem. That'll ultimately lead to a healthier Steem network, that may (given an informed market) increase their stake's worth by millions of dollars. Surely, that's worth a lot more than fishing for a few thousand here or there for selling delegations and votes.
Of course, the whales need to unite and take action to enhance content on Steem, and delegate to hundreds/thousands of the most engaged and loyal curators of the community.
Yes, I know this is an utterly utopian idea, and will never happen, but thought I'd leave it out there. But then again, Curie and steemSTEM are still surviving, so it is not impossible. As far as I'm aware, neither pay for upvotes etc. The same might also be true of OCD, I think?
PS, to clarify: Projects that do not ask anything from curators or authors. They do not pay for voting power, but rely on altruistic whales. They return all revenues back to the community. This way, there's complete apolitical meritocracy with no scope for corruption.
As mentioned in the chat, that's not wrong, but I think if we limit subjective requiements and focus on objective, as in, referenced, credited images, original content, more than 25 words, then we can easily guarantee a minimum, and if they don't match those objective requirements then they can't complain.
Regarding Curie, at steemstem, we get paid via the curation rewards that are generated from our team's work in science. It's not huge (the people we upvote get substantially more than I ever will being one with the power), but it keeps me happy
We basically need more OCDs and curies and steemstems, and utopians. And for the whales to delegate power to them. How do we do that?
Ha! Butthurts
@mobbs, in order for us to determine if the whales will bite, would be to first determine what their ROI on leasing to upvote bots is. After that, if you can get close to that ROI, then its all about what the whale feels like doing. If its far below, then its certainly going to be zero dice unless they understand what your unique value proposition is and how they can benefit from it.
I think what you are offering might not be reasonable, only because there are plenty of whales who do not post and only upvote. Why? Because if I had $500,000 in a savings account, chances are that I don't have time to sit around writing and upvoting stuff.
The reality of what will happen to steemit can only be one of two choices. Both of which fall in line with whales who are only here to turn a profit. If steemit continuously produces bad content, then the circle jerk upvote bots will continue to accelerate the erosion of value as steemit continues to attempt to take off.
The other way to make money, and much more explosively is to find ways to incentivize people to keep producing GOOD content such that over time, those who strive for perfection and growth of their craft will be on par with the best users on youtube and instagram. Which in it self, is NOT an easy thing to do. The only pitch I can come up is to say that its in their best interest to push the best of the best to continue to provide the best content in order to increase the value of STEEM, otherwise it will be stuck at its current price, forever.
Lets face it, the most successful bloggers and vloggers on steemit are a FAR cry from those who are on youtube. That's because theres still not a large enough economic incentive for them to switch to this platform, which means that the only way is for steemit content creators to improve their craft, and in for that to happen, they must get the biggest rewards.
Sorry I read this on my phone when I woke up and forgot about it.
Well, a large part of what you write is exactly the intent of my proposition and I think it would be potentially quite successful in doing so.
The whales I refer to are precisely the ones who don't post, the ones who either upvote fo curation rewards, or sell votes thus spurring the abuse.
My proposal doesn't even touch upon upvote bots. Upvote bots are not a critical problem as of yet, the majority made for small users who are trying to get rich quick, not for the millionaires on top.
However, I've determined that the vote selling business in question makes about $720,000 a year if the rate is the current blocktrades rate and they get rent out 4 million's worth of SP, as blocktrades is.
With my idea, a random example of paying $20 for a premium upvote, and 50 people do that per day, that's $360,000. You could very reasonably double that to 100 a day, or $40 for bigger votes to match their current model, or even more.
Finally, I don't think we need to be comparing things with YouTube and so forth. YouTube took up 2% of the internet at one point, we're hardly in the same league, this is a small community website where almost everyone knows everyone else at a certain point, so I'm not concerned about upping quality, and besides, quality is subjective and we shouldn't really force higher quality upon people
no worries! Thanks for replying! I think the quality of the content is critical to invetors (whales). If I were a whale, I wouldn't support half the content on here. strike that, i wouldn't support 75% of the content on here. There are days where i struggle to find something to upvote. And while quality is subjective, we can all agree that we wouldn't upvote something that is equatable to midnight word vomit that summarizes everything an article they read just said.
Trying to stay back on point now!!! If you offered premium upvotes to whales, then you still need to incentivize them to post to begin with, otherwise they will default back to upvote bots. I wouldn't bother posting a day to try and collect rewards from my $500,000 investment. I would litterally have more important things to do.
So if I were a whale, what a I really want is to see my money invested into something that is legitimately good, like a community project, an ongoing series, and growing idea etc.
I bring up youtube because youtube has become an area where someone use it as a utility to show something on video, rather than trying to only collect the attention of other users. Its a bit more raw in its use, which is something that we need here to create more real characters.
Now to make some breakfast....
One of us is misunderstanding the other hang on... I don't want any whales to produce content, which seems to be what you're saying. All they need to do is delegate their money to curators, and then sit back and watch the money come in. Which is exactly what you're saying you would want to see: 'money invested into something like a community project' - as in, curation teams that do the quality checking on the whale's behalf.
Right?
i am defintely misunderstanding you because I didnt get why a whale would pay for a premium upvote (other then to vote on thier own content). But yes, I think delegating SP to curators is the key to success, but this success must bridge to the outside world. Content creation and keeping SBD internal to the steem economy does not serve any purpose. The more SBD can reach the outside world, the more likely it is that the outsideworld invests in SBD. its sort of like wall st. They sell financial instruments and that cycle creates a predictability of money that is the engine to the world economy.
Totally. I do see a few great incentives for that cause, such as a steemstore where you can buy products directly with steem (can't remember what its called), but also the fact that there's slowly becoming a whole range of social media mimics; twitters, youtubes and so forth all linked to steem blockchain, which I think is fantastic, or would be if they weren't so clunky... one day!
I like the idea very much! However, as Steemit continues to grow, these curation efforts will become harder and harder to keep up. Also, it seems, for the most part, your proposal would suggest to whales to take their delegation away from a wildly profitable endeavour, which is Upvote Services which I doubt they will.
I'd say that Upvote Services are a much larger problem than people realize. With each upvote that is shelled out, that amount is taken out of the rewards pool. It also completely ruins the sorting algorithm as a piece of content that organically earned $100 in upvotes from creating awesome content, would sit next to a piece of trash which upvoted themselves for $100.
Since everybody uses Upvote Services, the playing field is aritifically heightened. For your content to ever see the light of day is $10 earnings before anyone even sees your content.
You would have to first, spend money, which gets taken out of the reward pool, and paid to a whale.
I have created 2 in-depth posts, one, identifying the issue and how it is negatively impacting Steemit as a whole, and another, posted on utopian.io as a proposed solution. You can find them here :
Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function
I seriously think this is a major problem facing Steemit right now and will continue to make Steemit more and more toxic until somethings changes. I sincerely believe that the solution I have came up with will alleviate the issue as well as bring a positive impact to Steemit. As of right now, I am focusing on bringing more awareness onto the proposal in hopes of it ever being implemented. Please do check it out if you have the time.
Thank you!
seems to me, someone one, perhaps even me, should make a steemit blockchain based website that filters out the 'upvoted by bot' content value. of course this does nothing for them leeching the system, but i think i'd enjoy the content more.
The issue is that with the current state of Steemit, that would eliminate a good chunk of all content in circulation. We clearly need a massive change to see this issue ridden of.
if the whales are sellouts just to make money, that greed will destroy steemit.
Then we are set to die along with it unless something is done. Somehow it really seems like every whale is avoiding me. I have tried very hard to reach out.. I posted on @jerrybanfield's post about Upvote Services, it is the no.1 comment on the page and he skipped me completely, and went on to upvote and comment on replies below me. Right below my comment @frystikken, the owner of @booster and also a witness, somehow didn't see my comment or couldn't be bothered to reply as my proposal is in direct competition with his extremely profitable endevour.
well i wouldn't reach out to the ones clearly abusing the system.
one thing, that is calling my attention now, is to focus on the wanted instead of the unwanted, and that is something i'm seeing fulltimegeek doing. he is promoting those that are thinking/acting independently. i liked this post ... so there are those working in the other direction. but maybe the answer isn't to destroy but just to do our best to not support those that using it, and finding those that do it right. my feed is actually getting better than 'trending' because of resteems/posts of those i'm following.
so i've not lost all hope yet, greed is a powerful drug, but it self destructs on lack of creativity.
I sincerely believe that Upvote Service owners don't have poor intentions on the matter, it may just be that at some point the profits become to intoxicating.
Thank you very much for the reference! I actually read that post and left a long long reply on his open forum post!
Indeed! I have not lost hope either, I have decided that I truly feel the need for my proposal to be taken seriously is important enough that I will keep pushing forth and bringing awareness to it as well as writing a proposal 1.1 adding new stuff and refining on existing points.
I don't have any dream that this would be a permanent solution regarding the size of steemit, but what we need right now is to clean up the platform, and this would be the quickest and easiest approach in my opinion.
Vote selling yeah... well I haven't done the maths as to its profitability compared to my idea, but I don't think it's impossible that they could make just as much money from priority-selling. Using curation teams vastly spreads out that reward pool to a much larger field, and as more whales get on board, the bigger and more numerous curation teams become: more money for the many, but including the elites.
I actually have had a thought about your idea more, and I think it is a good solution.. I will integrate it into my proposal 1.1 and give you credit accordingly!
woo!
No matter what the system, someone will figure out how to exploit it, and I get jealous because I didn't think of it first.
:)
perhaps, but that doesn't mean we can't make it really, really hard, and super not worth the effort.
A good proposal. Without profitable business solution, curation will never get big attention and lure of voring bot will always persist.
I was proposing the similar ideas to @minnowbooster, @buildawhlae and @bellyrub for eons while they got millions of SP from whales.
https://steemit.com/bellyrub/@bellyrub/what-if-bellyrub-picked-the-users-that-can-use-my-services-and-last-a-week-than-we-can-choose-others#@riseofth/re-bellyrub-what-if-bellyrub-picked-the-users-that-can-use-my-services-and-last-a-week-than-we-can-choose-others-20171126t012110367z
One more request, since you have worked on these curation projects ( @curie, @steemstem and @ocd). Can you make a post, how users (new) can use (get benefit from) these services? How do they work? How to get their attention? All these curation site does not have wikis on their profile. Yes, it is possible to do a research and reading (searching) old posts. But it will be easier for someone like you, who already have great experience with them.
Can you kindly make a big post about those curators and provide a link in your profile (perhaps) to help us all?
you mean doing the right thing doesn't pay as well?
being a schill is more profitable?
it has always been this way, doing what is right is usually less exciting, but always better for the long run.
unfortunately I'm set to leave OCD because I'm about to start full time work and I can't handle the workload of all these AND my own posts. Regardless, I don't really have the reach or influence for a post to be 'big'. this post has a huge discussion going on but even that has gotten less than half the payout of bigger users posting photos of their garden or something.
Each individual team have their own way of getting their names heard: OCD post daily and comment on every post they curate, steemstem have comment pictures on upvotes posts or posts that need advice/improvement also they post weekly content for the purpose of recognition of other users etc.
Curie is just so huge that everybody knows it. There's not really much I can add to that!
I am for the curation teams for sure.
I am also for decentralised platforms and am glad to see some high SP users giving out their Steem Power to individual curators.
More of BOTH please!
Hopefully your dream will be realized =D
i don't really agree to this, the reason why steemit is "fading" is that bots are everywhere, trailing bots etc, post are valued by a small number of people with powers or with large powers following them.
The quality of the post is judged only by a few, yet the value or the factor of relationships kicks in and make things bias. I think the solution to this is everyone's vote contains the same value, and no bots/ trails are permitted for voting, after all if you haven't read the post, how can you say you like it just because someone represent you that "liked" it.
You won't randomly like post on facebook without looking into the content, so why is this allowed in steemit, and money is involved?
(but of course we are all here for money right, even the curation teams are just for profit anyway, so steem on~)
Totally unworkable. Bots will happen anyway, and stake-based voting works in favour of the platform. One identity per vote isn't something that can be solved all that easily.
You conflate the two parts of his idea. Stake weighting is killing the platform, not working in favor of it. It is the primary vector for oligarchical concentration of rewards.
Bots are a separate issue, and 2FA can go a long ways towards reducing bots on Steemit. Captchas can do more.
The unworkable thing is NOT taking necessary steps to reduce the financial incentives to ignore posts from authors with low stake. Rewards were intended to gravitate to good content - not deep pockets. Stake weighting VP has failed to do that, and mitigating those failures with more financial manipulation is likely to just make the problem worse.
Delink SP from VP. Make Steemit become what it was meant to be.
Destroy all bots, and make Steemit an actual SOCIAL media platform, rather than a rewards pool mining bot farm.
Edit: need to point out that's an old chart. I think the problem may actually be worse now, as that was from just prior to HF19.
It's rather naive to think bots can be stopped in open, permissionless blockchains like this one. My as well embrace it and develop a culture for good use of it.
As for identity/stake arguments, please check out my sidenote and the top comment in this recent post: https://steemit.com/flagging/@kevinwong/the-value-of-downvotes-explained
How many bots can solve captchas?
How many phones can a botnet have?
Perhaps bots can't be eliminated entirely, but using those two readily available methods, 99% of them would be gone.
@andrarchy didn't address either. Nor did you.
Your solution is predicated on the idea that anyone wants to correct the problem and not just go on milking the cash cow. I don't have a problem with people getting a return on their investment.
It's the pretense of promoting quality content that annoys me.
i.e. Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining.
i was thinking something like each person per day could have 10 votes each worth 1 SBD or something, so either you have good social network where people really like giving it to you or your post is really worthy of that 1 SBD. (if you want to vote more than 10 posts, then you can use the delegated votes from others, instead of pouring all the votes to limited number of post that person could read per day). This should diversify the value being paid for each post, and the content spectrum of the post.
To me right now steemit is like a journal publication group, post are submitted to review (not peer review!!) , get "paid" if pass the "selected" panel (with huge SP), while post that are not within their expertise becomes undervalued and those writers will gradually fade out from the community. As the platform is more like a publication group rather a social media platform for leisure while earning money at the same time.
Bots will happen, I understand but i do believe that there are ways to discourage or reduce the use of bots.
I think we need to not pretend that we're all here for the money, as you say, and provide some monetary benefit for the elites on top, which is why I came up with this idea, it aims to satisfy the rich 1% while also handing it down to the honest portion of the 99%. Removing a whale's power by limiting their vote power would de-incentivize them, I'd guess, and again it would be so much of an overhaul that it wouldn't happen in decades... you know how slow progress is on here!
If the true purpose of Steemit was to promote and reward quality content, then there'd be no weight staked voting.
1 person, 1 vote.
Sure, you'd still have people with lots of sock puppet accounts and the circle jerking vote blocks but their influence would be a lot less.
@sweeeetsssssj would still get huge payouts because half of Asia votes up her shit. But she is so innocent and lonely looking.
The true purpose really depends on who you are. In many eyes, the true purpose is to make a profit on the market while some losers write shit. To others it's to have an uncensored media platform to push one's agenda without suppression. For the most part, it's far more about making money than content and we shouldn't try to hide that. 1 person 1 vote is putting too much emphasis on an idea with its footing in a non-existent utopian society. To assure this utopia, drastic measures inevitably get made and things end up more like Communist China (slight exaggeration I know) or the US war on drugs.
Embrace the greed and make it work in everyone's favour, I say.
This is why the retention rate for all accounts opened on Steemit in 2016 is ~11%.
Embracing the greed will never work in everyone's favor. It will only continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of the greedy. Apparently, ~89% of folks aren't greedy, at least in 2016.
I dunno. I get your skepticism but you haven't yet pointed out a reason why my idea wouldn't be a far superior situation to the current one. Obviously as I said it may not actually be the ultimate solution, but as far as progress goes here, this is likely the best we have realistically
You're right. Every word.
And she is innocent and lonely looking.
your idea is good, too bad (almost) nobody will give a shit
I dunno I'm getting quite a lot of discussion here. You're the only waste of space so far =P
I will be happy if I am proven wrong and this actually leads somewhere!
Honestly I was looking to refine it really. Either that or somebody steals the idea and takes all the credit. That's how things usually go in my life!
here, have my resteem and shut up
aww, shucks
I got a lot of fun reading your post. I liked the post very much...Iam requested to all of you please give me vote for my comment///PLEASE
I think this is very good idea and something that can bring a lot more sustainability to the system. It will surely bring the quality of the posts around the platform to a higher level as it is going to be more difficult to get an upvote just by paying a certain amount.
And there are pragmatic reasons for whales to be willing to participate. As this approach would be much more sustainable than the current one, they could expect good ROI not just because they'll get a good percentage in terms of STEEM, but because this becoming the norm is very likely to help the price of STEEM grow. And if you are a whale, a small increase in the price of STEEM could alone offer huge ROI. The current pay-to-gain system is unsustainable and is making the steem community worse off, less attractive and less stable. This means, it's certainly getting some people turned off and the interest in being a part is being lowered by that. This is bound to have an adverse effect on the price. If this is countered and high quality content is rewarded, this will surely bring in more authors and more investors willing to profit from a growing and expanding community. I think if this point of view is presented to whales on regular basis, they might actually come to the realization that supporting sustainable practices will get them a higher ROI than supporting practices that undermine the integrity of the platform for immediate gains.
You have good vision and perspective. It's a shame some of the whales don't. For the most part, why think longterm when short gives the immediate reward?
Short sightedness, i know. But like the rest of the cryptocoins, the rich are just pumping in, exploiting then pulling out and moving to the next one, it wouldn't surprise me if this is just another version of that!
Anyway I'm hoping enough people read this that it planted a seed in the minds of some of the bigger users I know who saw it, and over time wll evolve into a thing! Keep an eye out for it!