Curation and Economic update

in #dtube7 years ago (edited)

While we are still working on update 0.8 and fixing our issues with storage and buffering, we decided to release this short part of 0.8 update a bit earlier because we felt like it deserves it's own article and visibility.

DTube Sponsorship Program

Starting from today, we are welcoming anyone to delegate Steem Power to DTube. While we would prefer that our users manually curate our content, we want to provide this option of passively investing while supporting DTube.

We will return your share of the curation rewards, and your share of the beneficiary rewards generated by the @dtube votes. Financially speaking, it will exactly the same as actively curating DTube content yourself with your own account. More about that a bit later in the article.

The delegation redistribution will happen weekly and will begin on the 18th of May 2018. You need to delegate before the 11th of May 2018 to be eligible for the first weekly payment.

On top of it, in order to increase DTube's voting diversity, we will invite our top three delegators into our curation team, if they refuse, we will propose to the next highest delegators. We will contact top delegators through our Discord server on the 11th of May 2018.

Improving our Curation

Opening our curation to new people requires us to improve our tools and organization.

We now run a discord bot that helps our curators work together and avoid mistakes we did in the past, such as re-voting on the same content, misclicking the voting percentage, voting for impostors, voting for old reposted videos, etc.

The decision to vote or downvote a content remains entirely human. The bot only provides arbitrage between curators to reach a common decision.

The bot has many features:

  • Detects reposts and plagiarism and blocks votes for those
  • Creates a 15 minutes decision window where all curators can contest an upvote
  • The more curators agree that a video is good, the stronger the vote will be
  • Lowers the vote strength depending on how many votes the author already received this week
  • Waits to never vote earlier than 30 minutes
  • Creates logs from the curation discord channel

We have tested this new system for a couple days now, and it seems pretty solid as nobody saw or talked about the change. This will allow us to improve our current ~5 people curation team to probably 10+ in the future, and miss less good videos.

Redistributing DTube Beneficiary Rewards

One of the most prominent concern of our users has been our '25% fees'. Technically speaking, at the current market value of SBD, our fees were about:
25 / (50+50*3.83) ~= 11%

These fees covered our costs for storage servers, encoding servers, paid a moderate income to our staff, paid for the AskSteem API, and we still have 80000 STEEM on our account to pay for bigger things in the future. Luckily, we will still earn curation rewards and will be able to keep afloat financially without having to compromise our future tokens fair distribution.

Instead of simply stopping to collect these beneficiary rewards like most other apps, we have decided to fully redistribute it to curators instead. This happens through the @dtube.rewards account that was created and started operating recently.

The way it works is simple, it looks at the beneficiary rewards collected by @dtube for a video, then distributes it back amongst all the voters, proportionally to the strength of their votes (rshares). The only exception to this rule, is when the voter is a public vote-selling bot, in which case the associated reward with the vote will be sent to the author instead of the bot.

We thought a lot about these changes, and we strongly believe that curators should be rewarded more than what they are currently rewarded. We are therefore using our beneficiary rewards to create this unique experiment on a large scale. This will give us precious insights for the future of DTube, where we want to create a balanced and self-sustaining economy.

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I loved getting those little dtube.rewards deposits in my wallet. That really motivated me to sit down at the computer and find the great videos that had come out. I would watch them and then make sure to vote after they hit the 30 minute mark.

What happened? The payments however small just stopped.

It is even more work to go and unvote each post that I made over the last two days. I will find something better to dedicate my voting power to.

Fun while it lasted.

I did not know dtube had quit their rewards program. Thank you for that and also for pdqproxy.png

Bro, how you win a lot of upvote in your comment? With that quantity (Cantidad)13.21=7.64 Steem, I would be millionarie here in Venezuela haha. Sorry for my bad English.

The only exception to this rule, is when the voter is a public vote-selling bot, in which case the associated reward with the vote will be sent to the author instead of the bot.

if app = dtube then ignore bid & activate bounceback

Go ahead and have fun making rules you little racist piece of pork.

Sir you so great man 👌.
Sir I appreciate your every post.
Sir I am resteemit and upvot you every post.

You forgot to add:
"Sir I lick your ass to get high upvote"

Good one ))

@carrioner If I think exactly the same.

lets see clearly the type of person that is, an interested. The farther away from this kind of people the better.

you @carrioner funny bastard ....hahaahhah

IM SO here for this 😩

Daj spokój Carrioner , wiem że kochasz hejcić :) / Chillout carrioner , know you loves bit of internet hate :P

lmaooo....... you have just murdered me with laughter,, savage served coldddd

leave Dtube alone . Dtube is a miracle

I can not upload the video to Dtube, I do not know what is the problem, but when uploading to upload a video, if upload, then click submit and not submit. Why do you say that?

Nice update, i'm interested to see how the curation distribution experiment will go, this is similar as changing author/curation reward % ratio, now there is a bigger incentive to curate DTube content.

I think it will be better off,ensuring that good work is rewarded

You should follow @icowatchdog. ICO Watchdog is your comprehensive solution to following the cryptocurrency market. Follow the market with 100% Free and Real-time cryptocurrency alerts for all your favorite messaging applications today. Follow @icowatchdog Steemit account for news updates and token sales/air drops.

What does your reply have to do with the original post?

Wow, that is an amazing update. The curation sounds now much fairer. I still think there should be hive solution for DTube but this is a big step forward. Well done. And the sponsorship model will hopefull bring plenty of new SP into your account.

Thanks for the nice comment flauwy. 1UP is a nice alternative and I considered it, but in the end I think we want something specific to us. We have the devs to make some tools, so it would be a bit lazy to use something that already exists but isn't specific to us.

Our sponsorship program comes in very late compared to other apps, but due to 'popular demand' we did it :)

Sorry tried to upvote but on busy mobile the two buttons are abnormally close 😭 I completely agree mate

Lowers the vote strength depending on how many votes the author already received this week

Although this comment may appear selfish, this is the one thing out of this whole post I find to be a very bad idea. Where is the incentive to keep creating if voting power is reduced as the week goes on?

Authors should not be punished because they choose to create more than others.

Other than that, awesome work!

This feature wasn't created to demotivate people from posting, at all. The feature is a protection agains't curators abuse. We have had problems in the past where some curators would favor certain authors. We don't want this to apply again.

FYI, this vote lowering thing is on the basis of 1 dtube upvote / day / person.

Okay thank you for clarifying! @heimindanger

So my understanding is that the bot will take into account how many votes have been given to the author that day and lower based on the quantity?

So does this reset every day? How would this affect someone who posts upwards of 2-4 times a day?

Here is the code ran by the bot for each upvote decided by curators:

https://github.com/dtube/emojibot/blob/master/upvote.js

I see @heimindanger. I see the variable malusPerVote takes into account 7 votes total, 1 per day. Then the voteWeight is determined based off of the malusPerVote taking into account additionally the cap of 10000.

So I guess I would have one suggestion and I may be alone on this but I would say adjust the algorithm on a day to day basis. Because as soon as someone makes 4 videos Monday and 3 Tuesday the remaining week is automatically lowered. I do believe this is logical but at the same time, people who produce high quality content on a consistent basis 1-3 times a day should not be forgotten about the remaining of the week.

I feel like this is a lot of progress towards keeping it fair and unbiased. All I ask is that @dtube please not forget about the high quality content creators. If people are posting consistently every day multiple times a day at a high quality, that should be rewarded. I made a video about this today regarding the interview with Ned..

Thanks for your work on DTube @heimindanger

Well, it only counts upvotes. Also, if the content is truly good, chances are multiple curators will like it and support it, and therefore you will get a higher vote.

Basically on each upvote you got last 7 days, your next upvote is reduced by -9.5%. So if you got 7 upvotes from dtube last week, your next upvote will be halved.

We believe that getting more than 1 vote a day from us to be too much. Even the best content creator in the world shouldnt get voted more than once a day by us.

Sorry if I missed it, but I think it should be a post about this topic, I heard a lot about how the distribution works, and how fair or unfair it is, or was supposed to be. Most of the people (like myself) doesn't know about this and would be a great message to send to encourage people to focus on quality and not quantity. Great work!

We have had problems in the past where some curators would favor certain authors. We don't want this to apply again.

That is so good to read.

I absolutelly agree!

I'd kinda argue those creators should be branching out and using other aspects of the system. Not just using Dtubes pool over and over and over . This will allow Dtube to curate more people and I feel it's a smart choice. In the end, this is all just my opinion and you know what they say about those .

What other aspects? If you’re a video creator, your primary goal is to create videos. Dtube is a video platform. It’s like telling Casey Neistat to stop vlogging daily on Youtube and start putting videos on Facebook instead.

DTube curating more people is a smart choice. But curating less for those who put in more is not smart at all.

Dlive and Dsound can be used as a content creator. You can uplaod video to Dlive and no reason you can't figure something out for Dsound. Then you have direct to Steemit post which are always good for helping build a true base. I disagree and feel this is a smart move but don't really want to go deep into details on public text beyond what was said here, anything said can become a dtube headline

That’s just being silly. Yes Dlive may have video capabilities. But why would you post there when it’s mainly for livestreaming? Dtube is very clearly specifically for uploading video. Trying to make a steem user “branch out” into doing something outside of their niche is absurd.

This type of logic makes no sense. Force a video creator who has poured time and effort into learning their skill and perfecting it to start posting to an audio hosting platform?

No. Absolutely not.

Dlive is a great option for video upload.

You are 100% entitled to your opinion. DLive may be great for uploading but the entire site is built to be a livestreaming platform and thus the homepage is full of livestreams not videos. And until that changes DLive will not be a good host for main video content.

Later man!

You argue dtube is a main video site but has no long term holding or view count which ,. Dlive has these features. Even the most basic video based content sharing sites have these features. Again this is all my opinion broskie and hope you have a good day.

I'd argue it's better than Dtube in some ways.

The view count has been on mind for a while as well. The problem with the view count on dtube, as i see it is this.

Its small. Really small compared to views on some other sites, so when you see a dtube upvote on a post you will frequently see only 1-2-3. Comments. Probably amounting to less then 10 views. If dtube were going by rewarding those that can get most interactions or views they would rarely be upvoting anyone. So dtube upvotes have turned into incubators for uplifting those that post frequently.
Thats the main problem i see here now.
The frequency of uploads to rewards correlation.
Now, i need to stress that im biased, i cant create 3 videos per day so i cant expect a dtube upvote ever 3 days. You might ask whos stopping me but whats the point of spamming so much same low effort content you can make 3 of in a day. Im not talking about the daily vlogs.

My opinion on that is that upload behavior is reaching closely towards the spam category.
Creators noticed that their best chance to make money is to spread content between dlive, dsound, dtube, spam as much content they can, never really improving anything, putting any additional work etc.
And i think thats really bad for the platform, since you really dont even give the audience a chance to absorb what you made.
As i said i could record a karaoke 3 times a day, 1 time for dsound, 1 time for dtube, 1 time for dlive. But whats the point? How can anyone appreciate your work if you just spam out a million and one videos.
Its just spam, really is. Money making spam no one will comment on or watch since you will put out 3 things every day.
I dont think that should be rewarded.

You may say why should those that work hard be punished, but this really isnt working hard. Its working a conveyor belt, doing as much as you can with as little effort as you can.
I really feel Dtube should support growth by rewarding creators that improve their content, that strive to reaching new heights. Not post-a-lots that never put any additional effort. in.
Yes i get in a lot of fights. haha :D

I understand your position. However I feel that you should go take a look at my page, look at the very first video I ever posted to Dtube, and look at the videos now... I think that you should look at my arsenal of over $5000 of equipment I have invested in since then and now. And lastly, I think you should watch me as I set up my studio, film, and edit (which takes a lot of time and effort) just to produce 3 videos a day...

You are generalizing. You are not being objective.

Of course im generalizing. Thats the whole point of my comment. You yourself said the exact same thing in your last video: "People think that Steemit is generally low quality content"..
I cant pick and choose every single creator and point out why this is high quality or why this isnt.
And yes, you really seem to do high quality work for the niche you do.

I for example didnt even own a mic 3 months ago when i started out.
I didnt have a mic, i didnt have a pop filter, a stand, lights, a program for audio editing, didnt know how to stop clipping, how to sync audio, etc.
But im trying. Every thing i do is special to me and has a point. If i did a million and one song a day that would be prostituting my talent for money. You cant interact with your audience, that particular video simply doesnt stay in focus less then a few hours until the next one.

When you take that route youre just doing it for the upvotes.
If you made 3 videos per day on youtube you wouldnt get nearly the views 1 per day does. Viewers would get burned out and that kind of spam would hurt you. But here, its quite opposite, sure you get less interaction, but more upvotes are coming in so who cares.

Dtube is here, or rather should be here to push forward those that actively claw their way to a level of quality that can compete with other platforms.

My talent and skill didnt change one bit from day one. But everything else did, things i didnt need to focus on, that are insignificant in comparison.

What im seeing (and sure, i can say, "not all" to comply to the semantics rule) is the conveyor belt content spam on platforms with high SP...
Ive seen "creators", if they are vlogers talk the same topic from a different angle in 10-15 videos in a row, musicians doing karaoke spam without ever trying anything remotely different (improving lighting, editing, location, genre, nothing). And they just switch platforms never improving in any way.

There is just no incentive to improve for them because this works
And im not talking reaching a high video quality like yours that you cant go far up from that so you are content.
You need to motivate your creators to move forward. Rewarding them for conveyor belt content isnt healthy in my opinion.
Thats not how you grow a viewer base, thats just feeding hungry cats that meow loudly under your table.

You know what, I think this was very objective and your point is well said. I can see your point of view and even agree with it to an extent.

I know one of the reasons I started creating more daily was because when I was posting once a day dumping hours into the video it would get missed. So I started breaking my content up, with an attempt to fairly monetize my channel.

Well said though, well said.

Thx. I mean its everyones right to monetize as much as they want, and how they want to do it. I cant say squat to them.
Ethics aside you cant go against those that work in the boundaries of the system, no matter the problems the system has.
This is more of a dtube focused complaint, where they need to decide the direction they want to go in and whats important to them..
Thx for reading my ramble. :D

I mean its all just everyone gaming the system. Filling up dtube storage with low effort content.
You have creators even reposting old stuff just to meet that 3 per day quota when they dont have time to dish out more and apologizing in chat to no reprimand of any sorts.
Its just ugly imo.
Its on dtube to fix this if they want, but i just dont like it.

I agree with that. Also, I've seen people with lots of upvotes, but most upvotes being in the low range. And then sometimes we can get very few upvotes, but in the high range. 1x $5 upvote is still 1 upvote. 10x 0.10 upvotes are still 10 upvotes. The second resulting in a lot less rewards. Authors should not get penalised depending ont he number of upvotes or their amounts. If their content is good, as with many I see on Dtube, they are entitled to all the upvotes with all the voting power they give. If I vote 100% for someone, I want my ten cents to give them ten cents, not eight, not five, but ten.

And thats what i think dtube should consider. How much people actually are interested in yout content. If a creator gets 10-20-30 legit supporting comments on their video and a bunch of upvotes that together amount to less then a few $ then dtube needs to lift that person up because the viewers obviously respect the content that person creates.
Atm there are those that never get rewarded by the curation team and they have a large interaction number on their posts and then there are those with only a few comments that get 20-30- even a 100 upvotes per month.
Hate me all you want but i cannot agree with that reward distribution

Yup. There's definitely a disproportionate distribution going on that needs to be addressed.

On a flip side too, a yet to be discovered user might not have the luxury of comments to their posts if the post isn't a little up in reward.

The @dtube.rewards idea is a very nice addition. I was pleasantly surprised to see some curation bonuses come through over the past few days.

That will make me take a much closer look at all the awesome content being created on Dtube for sure :)

It's appreciated!

We want to increase the incentive for people who watch videos and upvote. Basically instead of 75/25 author/curator distribution, DTube is about 56/44.

This should be interesting. If curation increases enough due to this incentive, the final payout for the author may be bigger than if no beneficiary rewards were taken and no incentive for curation was offered.

It seems like a good addition to me and a more fair way of curation although I am still very new to the game. There seems to be a lot of changes recently... looking forward to see whats next

Agreed @carlafrey. I am also new to this "game" when it comes to video content, but not going to let that stop me anymore.

Same with me @jongolson, I plan to start using @dtube a little more in the future.

I hope to be set up soon to do video, just have to get everything set up

Well... this post is very refreshing and encouraging. It is nice to see a true desire to seek fairness.
It means a lot to a creator like me who now only posts on DTube to know that benefits of a fairer voting system is seen and acknowledged by Dtube team. The energetic benefit to the entire dtube community is the thing for me here. More equal distribution of upvotes in my opinion motivates and lifts the quality of content and spirit of entire dtube community. So I sincerely thank the Dtube crew for this improvement.
As a person who has often felt ignored by dtube... while doing my damndest to not complain despite feeling my videos at least could see the ocasional upvote.
I don’t claim to have awesome content. But I do claim to put my real self, love, time and fun into my videos. Thus little to no dtube love but seeing it given so often to same folks...plain and simple it hurts a bit..... though I keep my head up and just keep creating. And this is not meant to be a complaint but a thank you. Thank you @Dtube / #dtube for the Dcentralized Dspersement!!
I also want to thank the amazingly supportive discord communities that I consider my families... each have supported me and other Dtube content providers. Thank you my Fams from @comedyopenmic / #comedyopenmic @dtubedaily / #dtubedaily and @steemitbloggers / #steemitbloggers
Hopefully we all will find the value in @dtube continued evolution!!!!

We thought a lot about these changes, and we strongly believe that curators should be rewarded more than what they are currently rewarded.

I agree. I think this change needs to happen at the blockchain protocol level, as I had advocated over a year ago. Along with some other needed changes, it could help with content quality, discovery, and investment into the platform.

This current system is not sustainable, in my opinion.

By the way - I appreciate the beneficiary rewards. It was a nice surprise to see in my wallet this week. Thank you!

Yeah, I think a lot of people focus on the reward curve, while it's not so important. Linear rewards are convenient and simple for people.

Clearly, all the incentives are not properly aligned today. A lot of talks about this stuff in my previous article

Wow, thanks for the update.
This is very import and I think you're in the good direction.

I'll continue Dtube-community-support (even if my ipfs node need to be upgraded)

Amazing work building this fantastic community through real human engagement.

Thanks to the Dtube Team!