When Curation Becomes a Nightmare - Steem as a 9 to 5
If you've spent a few hours on the SteemIT website trying to scavenge quality posts you've probably been frustrated many more times than you've found something worthwhile to upvote or comment on (other than the top posts). With an ever growing user base and incentives, spam will most likely be a commonplace.
Bot vs Manual Curation
Reddit and the likes have reputation (or karma) aswell as bots and human moderators. Skipping past the bot algorithms which will evolve in due time (with things like @Anyx 's Cheetah Anti-Spam bot and @pharesim's upcoming bot that calculates the required sp, watch posts, and enables a whitelist of users that can use tags to add/remove users), manual curation while subjective, is what most non-technical users will be doing to gain SP and SD.
My Typical Day At Work - (Steem)
On a typical work day I sit at my PC for around 8-15 hours a day - mostly using Slack, Reddit, Facebook and reading up on cryptocurrencies in general (and sometimes actual work in between). Those hours are now allocated to curating and producing content on SteemIT.
On a normal day I upvote anything from around 20-40 posts, as I read them in full before upvoting ( Yes, I know most don't but I'm a perfectionist ). The bigger batch of them are actually shared in the postpromotion channel on Slack from well-known users.
The rest are from searching through the vast amounts of posts (mostly spam) on the SteemIT website which is time consuming to say the least, while also making you miss out on quite a few of the gems due to the current filters or non-filters.
Stumbleupon and Why It Matters To Us
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine (a form of web search engine) that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles. - Wikipedia
If I had just one button similar to what Stumbleupon has (see below):
Steps would be relatively simple
1. See first random post
2. Read post
3. If interesting check for plagiarism / If spam flag or skip
4. If unique upvote and/or comment
5. Press button to next post
6. Rinse / Repeat
This option would :
a) Find the hidden gems
b) Combat spam
c) Increase productivity
Final Words
This is more of a proposal which will hopefully be implemented in addition to other proposals like sub-categories and personalized interests. I think @ned and @dan will most probably provide a lot more features in the future. User experience matters and tweaking is an on going journey.
If you like the post upvote and also any opinions would be gladly heard and commented on.
I have seen this bot frenzy ramp up lately, so I wrote up a description of how they can fix the spam\tagging mess without bots with 3 simple features. Take a look and tell me if you think a bot would do a better job.
Instead of creating automated censorship tools: Allow the users to fix the problem through curation.
Hmmmmm.... this post seems like a bot post.
ok you got me ill upvote...
Didn't know bots are sarcastic :)
How can you tell? I was fooled. Can I give repholder the Turing test or something?
OOo.. I got a good one.. if you were left alone in an underground mansion bunker with your creator and a nerdy developer who has a crush on you, and a knife, would you stab your creator and sneak out the door after locking the developer in a room with no food or water?
Not sure if serious or trolling ...
Asking me something Siri wouldn't be able to answer :)
How about Cortana? :)
I don't like Windows 10, it's too pushy.
I totally agree. I have actually been fighting to keep Windows 10 out of my computer after micro$oft started the forced installing. Luckily there were several programs, registry hacks and lists of updates to remove.
Next month it will stop because Win 10 won't be free anymore. :)
There are huge problems with Win 10 privacy. Micro$oft will spy on everything you do with it. It even saves Skype voice calls.
Some related thoughts from me on why the curation rewards aren't high enough, and the likely impact of this on Steemit.
Read your post and upvoted. I think low curation rewards might be due to the new reverse auction feature implemented in the code, which some people might not know of. You have to vote between 15-30 minutes of the post.
Here is a link to an interesting post about maximizing your curation rewards
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemship/how-to-vote-smart-and-profit-from-steemit-s-new-curation-rewards
I wrote a quick proposal last night that has to do with creating a true market for curation rewards. I'd love your feedback!
you know, i have small SP but i sit at NEW a lot of time and upvoting interesting sometimes. And i agree, thet it is hard to find something good.
Excellent insight and great content!!
Bravo!!
I hope this gets added into the upcoming features. Would make things a lot more easier around here.
Great Post!
I have what I think is a viable solution. Mind looking at my proposal below and discussing it? I want to build this tool for the community, but I would like to make sure it has a comprehensive and compelling feature set.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@williambanks/bot-warz-a-hybrid-approach
Thanks!
Checked it out upvoted and commented :)
Nice post, and a good algorithm to follow for maintaining ones sanity. Today I tried only looking at posts with less than one dollar in rewards. It made things a little more interesting, and it kept me from sinking into a jealous/frustrated stupor. Thank you for sharing.
Great proposition. This would help a lot.
You are right. Developers have a lot of proposals, but the battle against spam-money-hunters should be at the top of them. Platform is loosing interest of the real-content-makers because their posts are not visible between spam messages(