Steemit idea number #??: Upvote markers
Ok, just a quick idea that may or may not be possible and for an added bonus, may or may not be useful. With that personal vote of confidence in the idea, let's go.
What I was wondering is if there is a way for a tag to be commented on a post that would call in a bot to vote on the post. Before you say 'yes, that already happens', can the bot subscribe to only some users comments to upvote the post?
What I was thinking is along the lines of this:
There are plenty of curation bots out there and it may be much better for the platform if they voted on decent content only. They could 'hire' manual curators who they trust to tag useful content. This way the curator can still vote on the content they like without attracting a bot vote.
The 'hire' a curator would mean that a curator could get a small percentage of the curation payout or something similar. Perhaps it would be paid in SP so that their own curation power increases too.
Big accounts holding a large amount of SP or their bots could more accurately target decent content and may set guidelines for their 'curation employees' to follow meaning that the curators are accountable and fireable if they misuse their 'upvote markers'. The big accounts are likely the more caring about the future of Steemit and therefore should be more interested in what content they upvote and what percentage of the pool they use. Leaving their votes unused rather than upvoting quality is counter to their long-term goals.
Potentially, a trusted curator could even call in the size of vote depending on content value. For example, Mark1, Mark5, Mark10 meaning that they can vary the bot vote on the fly too. The bot owner could give guidelines for qualification of value also.
If the bot is set to say vote down to 80% power, curators can be warned or the bot goes to sleep and when it wakes up, starts voting the back log. I am sure that when it is getting close to the 80, a warning can be sent to the curators somehow or they can see what others are marking through a UI. Double votes on content can also be viewed or, first one gets voted..
It could also be used effectively by accounts like @steemcleaners and @cheetah who could find and pay trusted researchers to do the leg work on the fly and mark posts for flagging. This would take away most of the need for a dropbox and will give a revenue stream to those interested in 'doing the weeding'.
This would also remove a lot of the accidental big votes on spam, plagiarised or shitpost content and may even see some more variation of providers reach trending. More variation should be happening there but it is not because many of the big accounts are only voting either who they know or, who their bots have been set to vote upon. This squeezes nearly everyone one else out of ever having a chance of getting into trending, a massive demotivator for many.
I know there are some very good initiatives out there like @ocd which looks for good quality, undervoted content (people that really believe in their work should check it out) and perhaps parts of this kind of system would be usable to streamline their activities.
There are accounts like @pharesim who follow trusted manual curators to find good content that could use things like the variable percentage marker rather than a set rate. Some accounts like @blocktrades who manually curates (from what I hear) can have days off and still trust that their huge voting power is going to a good cause, quality content.
In my view, the people that have faith in Steemit and think it has the chance to grow are likely under the impression that content is going to matter in the long-term. The highly invested (lots of SP, time, effort) would be somewhat crazy to not use their voting power as much as possible on a wider pool of decent authors as it would support the drive for quality by actually finding quality people and supporting them. There is a huge difference between a dollar, ten, twenty or (yet to happen for me) hundred dollar payout for authors, and increasing their chances of larger payouts if they have good content raises the incentive to consistently perform.
As said, this may or may not be possible and it likely has some cons in there also but, as someone that does want Steemit to survive, this may be an added tool that helps bury the nonsense by significantly increasing the incentive for quality as well as giving a more sensitive approach to users and increased revenue stream possibilities for those worthy.
Yes/No/Maybe/gtfo?
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
I vote no. I understand that there are bots, but I would prefer if we did not add any more complexity to them .. instead I'd prefer that we just got rid of every one of them!
Anyway, that's my opinion, and apparently many many others think that I can go fly a kite with that opinion .. oh well! :)
The problem with no bots is that manual curation is needed to use the power. some accounts are run by very, very busy people but are very invested. This system would make the bots manual in a sense as there would be human curators for each vote but they would wield the bot's power.
I don't honestly feel that curation adds that much value to the platform. As a young platform, Steemit needed it to attract a user base, but as it matures, I see curation becoming more of an anchor than a float that encourages participation. I think this is probably partially the reason why the curation percentage went from 50 down to 25 in one of the semi-recent forks.
Yes, Voting for others and earning a portion of the rewards as a curation "bonus" is nice, but you should be manually curating content. Otherwise you're risking promotion of poor quality content, which then cheapens the entire platform because quality content is no longer being rewarded. I believe that Bots have created a vicious cycle of promoting the wrong (low quality) content. And people see this happening and wonder why their own low quality content doesn't get the same value, so they use another bot to help promote their low quality content.
And around and around we go until the quality content providers get too frustrated about their work not being appreciated or valued and they leave, or decide to produce crappy content too and use the bots to promote their crap!
I'm sorry if I went down too deep of a rabbit hole or stood on my soap box for too long...
I have spent half my life in rabbit holes and on soapboxes.
Without bringing in advertising, which will come one day and be detrimental to content, curation reward is likely the only way to get big investors in. I don't agree with the self-voting using pay for vote bots as this rewards poor quality content.
The return to manual curation is what I am trying to drive at but again, for massive accounts to spread their power usefully, they likely need help. For example, Blocktrades current vote is around 300 dollars and when time is good for Steem at only 2 dollars, that becomes 600. So, if they manually curate and want to give 100 dollars to each currently when Steem is low, they must read 30 articles a day. at 600, they must read 60.
Their kind of vote is the kind of money that should be going to good content and authors but there is probably no way one person can consistently read 60 articles a day AND do what they do in the normal world that has allowed them to have that kind of investment. But, with a couple curator employees, they can easily spread their wealth widely.
let's say they give 15 x $100 votes (33% votes [5 full] ) and then 75 x $20 votes. That would be equal to 10 full votes. To do this they need to read and check for quality and find 90 worthy articles. What are their chances? Delegating the curation part may be able to give finding the 75 to 3 or 4 people while they themselves can find the 15 they want to vote a lot. I think my maths works..
For better or worse, bots aren't leaving anytime soon so actually having manual curators control them helps.
Well, being on the receiving end of a blocktrades upvote this week, I can say I am for this proposal, If the big guys need help I would happily provide it for them. This does seem like a good way to "spread the wealth" without doing it unsupervised
So I think that you're looking at Steemit as a purely investment strategy as opposed to a social media platform. I'm looking at it from the Social Media perspective. Rewards are ancillary. Therefore, blocktrades not using all of his votes on a daily basis does not negatively impact the quality of content provided on the platform. On the contrary, bot votes for poor quality content does negatively impact the platform.
Now, the rewards are definitely a draw for any new user. Other users will like the idea that this is all based on a blockchain (others will never adopt for the same reason-something about my writing lasting for eternity is partially harrowing).
I don't think that whales need to be 100% active on the platform in order for it to be successful as the platform grows. There will be plenty of medium size fish who keep everyone afloat (think middle class in an economy). The uber rich do very little, the upper middle class does the most (trying to become uber rich), the rest of the middle class does what they can, and the poor are trying to climb up the ladder.
I think that in a mature Steemit economy, we will see something like that. And if a whale wants to augment their income on the platform again, all they have to do is put in some manual effort themselves (or to a delegate).
This sounds like a good idea.