My HF21 after thoughts and impressions of new steem trending page
So the HF happened and we had a little shutdown. No biggie really. I remember HF20 and to be honest it feels like HF21 was a way smoother rollout than its predecessor.
I had a quick scour around steem since the hardfork and I have had a chat to a few people to see what the feelings are and to get a sense of the general mood of steem.
My own observations are that my votes worth is down around 25%. I didn’t do a calculation so that’s an eyes view. If I am way out, it’s because my eyes are wonky 😊.
I was expecting to see changes on the payout values of all posts waiting payout due to the new curve. But looking at my own account, the payout value does not seem to have changed much. I have been told some posts went up by $100 while others were flagged down.
So, the flags. Well I have seen some healthy discussions, but I was rather disappointed in one channel where the downvote power was already going to people’s heads. I was rather surprised to see some of the names that were leading the pack. Ok so I didn’t look at the content they were flagging, but I was not impressed with the conversation. So much so I would nearly go upvote the content again!
On the positive side, I have been told some post were reduced by $40/$50 and that “trending looks good”
Does it?
Project updates, Steem promotion…. should all this be on trending? Is that the vision? Did we not introduce a proposal system for this sort of stuff? Where is the great content that non steem users will see when they hit trending? Are posts about steem and project updates going to attract new users? Maybe it does not matter, maybe no one outside of steem sees the trending page. Its was fucked anyway, so it looks right now to be in the same state. I hope we don't get into removing shit just to replace it with shit from the inner circle.....shhhhh paula quickly!
I’m confused
“Use your flags” I hear you say, “don’t like what’s on trending then go flag it”. Yea right, that will be fun. Do you get off on that? because reading some of the chat, some people do. I reckon an analysis of trending right now would show many of the current trenders are also the flaggers!!!!!
My nature is not really to flag, yep I have done it, very little mind you but I have. Best guess would be 20 flags in over 2 years. And yep I’m sure I will in the future, but having free flags will not entice me to change my nature.
I guess that not being so positive about trending leaves me subject to the downvote pack. I’m sure there are a few that would like to hit me anyway just for the sake of it. Interesting times ahead and as my first post after the HF, it will be interesting to see who will flag me first.
I think that at the moment, the Steemit trending is not about attracting users and probably shouldn't be, it should be more enticing to investors as the goal is to have Steem holders. The community/tribe/frontends/applications etc are another matter and sould empower the content they create.
If I was an investor, I would be happier landing on Steemit Trending now and seeing development and SteemFest type posts to show an engaged community.
The Steemit Trending page is a place where the overvalued whatever content was highly visible for those who might come in here as investors and be turned off from. Downvoting them has turned Steemit.com into more of a frontend home for crypto and steem development, application, investment and the like as well as hopefully and eventually returning some Steem to those who are interested in Steem long-term.
Sorry to tell you but the non steem traffic landing on trending is not full of investors. The people that land on steem, land here due to user-generated content. 66% of traffic to steem is organic search. you do an organic search as an investor and see if you land on steem. so would you like to rename trending 'Investors page' . It makes us look desperate as a content platform.
Maybe I didn't explain myself well. If you search for investment stuff you are going to find banks. If you are interested in getting into crypto at some point and considering buying in, you might want to find somewhere like steemit trending at the moment and start exploring from there, not what it was. It is better than a random forum for crypto or a telegram group.
Sorry, but that's crap.
If I'm an investor and I'm coming around with a cool million dollars to drop on somebody's lap regarding a blockchain-based social media network, I don't want to look at the Trending page and see the platform talking about itself. It's the worst kind of wank, the worst kind of public masturbation, and as an investor what it tells me is that as soon as someone burns out on the topic, someone moves on, someone realizes all the fanciful stories are just that – fancy, they leave. They no longer remain social.
As an investor, what I want to see when I look at activity, popular activity, on a social media platform is a diversity of ideas and opinions. I want to see people talking about their personal lives, about longer form articles which do analysis on recent political events, about people's trips to the grocery store and their trips to Honolulu. I want to see that there are a lot of people with a lot of different interests being rewarded for pursuing those individual interests. If I see that, I know that my investment is at least going to get spread over enough topics and subjects that as things fall in and out of fashion, my money will keep earning me more money.
Trending has never been very good at all. It either gets dominated by bots, which at least generally have the advantage that the number of topics people are willing to pay to have pushed to the top are slightly more diverse, or by a masturbatory monoculture. Neither one of them are particularly good because neither one of them reflect the actual interests of individual users who are on the platform.
Right now, Trending is exactly like a random forum for crypto with a preference for STEEM or a Telegram group. Identical. It's the exact opposite of what somebody really interested in investing in the technology wants and needs to see.
Word...
"masturbatory monoculture" sponsored by
upvote circles, lacking in quality... but pretend
like they are it...
"Masturbatory Monoculture"
You summed it up in 2 words. Outstanding.
Sorry but that’s crap. If I’m an investor considering dropping $1m bucks on a blockchain I would absolutely want to see a blockchain with active dapps development.
I’m not saying that the trending page is good, those things are not mutually exclusive. Just saying your opening sentence is as crap.
You would absolutely want to see active digital application development – but what are those digital applications supposed to be doing? What is their purpose? The point of their existence?
They exist, at least in the Steem blockchain technology, according to the white paper and everything else that people say, in order to find and promote the best content.
If you go to a site and look at the content which is popular, trending, hot, whatever the term is for the day, and all of that content – every single bit – is just people on the platform jerking each other off about how cool it is, you don't put your money there. You would be an absolute idiot to put your money there.
Somewhere in an out-of-the-way corner, the people who are building and supporting the blockchain should have a page which specifically talks about their digital applications and success stories and how they work – that's important too. But it needs to be not anywhere near the top page, not anywhere near the front page, not the big promotional angle, because the whole damned thing is supposed to be a platform for users to get value out of the platform.
As an investor, if the thing I'm looking at doesn't look like it actually does a job well, if it doesn't do the job which it says it's for well, that is a shit investment and I should avoid it. Of course, the world is riddled with investors who bet the other way, but most of them aren't investors for very long.
If the most rewarded content on the Steem blockchain is all made out of the masturbatory monoculture, it looks terrible for investment, and it doesn't matter how much you think that saying so is crap, it remains true.
Ah but there we arrive at yet another layer... is the current dev show worthy. That’s another topic yet again.
Echo chambers are masturbatory monoculturen which more often than not don’t give a damn about the actual quality of the delivery or its product.
As an investor, not a trader, you will understand that the ROI is in taking the token to $2, rather than in all other wank we see. Wank we see because most people talk about investors but don’t know how investors think. Investors are not here to maximize is an inflationary down pressure market. They will assess if they see token utility and whether that utility has any chance of creating both complexity and scarcity.
Remember that unless C- and D-round, an investor seeks at least 6-8x. Not just some increased number of tokens, they most likely won’t care about those. They did calculate the inflation before investing and interest is most likely less than their funds management fees they charge their own investors.
Then make a DAPP trending section, simple!
It's open-source, go for it. Make it happen!
While I think there is something about the concept of creating a "dev updates" section, the delivery - one often heard - of "Not my cup of tea, get it out of the way [to a tribe/less visible section]" sucks.
There's two other alternatives:
News flash: trending will always suck for a majority because not tailored. And I'm pretty sure neither of us wants to go there because it just opens too many damn cans of worms as last decade online has shown us. Meanwhile, in China they now pay by smiling as a facial scanner. As if there wasn't enough tracking and ID in place there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Go to the front ends. there are gateways in trending to those too.
That is exactly the opposite of what I should be doing.
If I look at what purports to be a general purpose social media platform without a up front declared subject focus, and I see that everything that is considered "popular" on that platform strikes the same note and that note is the platform itself, I know it's imploding. I know that. The most important thing that they have to talk about is themselves. And that's just from looking at the headlines. If you actually start looking at the content, it all has the same monotone delivery of how awesome everything is and how much money you can make, and here is 1 More Way you can make money.
That is not a social network. That is not a social media platform. That's an echo chamber which is looking to implode at any moment.
If I then come around and look at the New page and see that there is a lot of very minor activity which is not masturbatory but none of it ever seems to get traction, none of it ever seems to get attention, and none of it ever seems to get rewarded – I know what's going on. I know this is not a place to put my money. The contrast makes it worse.
Now to be fair, this is not a new development. This has described the Steem blockchain roughly since the beginning, with some variation in the times that it was running high in value. When the token is valued high, people feel like they have the elbow room to spread their SP out across multiple lower bets because they feel assured they're going to make their basic with the safe ones and other kinds of content can then flourish under that banner.
In times when the token is valued low, like right now, nobody wants to risk a bad bet. No one can afford to. Anybody that could afford to take their money out of the platform and wasn't socially intimidated by the people who kept screaming that removing your money because you need it is a betrayal of everything holy – all those people are gone. They took their money out. They are doing other things. Some of them probably pay better.
This is a terrible time to believe that an investor would want to come by, see Trending, and think "this is a place we want to put our money." But that was true last week and last month and last year. Hell, you could probably make a good argument that bid bot activity at least forced some synthetic diversity onto places like Trending because people would chase the bots, trying to get their vote in before the bot closed the deal. It wasn't real valuation of quality, but at least it was breaking up the monotony a little.
It remains to be seen how effective the current rewards curve is going to be at breaking the bid bot power but I have no doubt in my mind what it's going to do to diversity of creators and pressure on curators to become a monoculture. That is is clear to me as the nearby star.
It's a common problem here.
Looking out for investors warps your mind. Distracts from creating a good product first.
Look what all the investor focus has brought us. Bid bots. "They expect ROI", I hear. Nice 20% ROI on a 90% loss.
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I think the obsession with investors has a broader toxic effect on the community, because first and foremost, it tells those who are involved, who are actually doing things, that they are less important than people who haven't done things or people who have done one thing (bring money) – and that affects everyone negatively.
Investors want a real thing to invest in, for the most part. They want a profit, reasonably enough. They want to get on board with something that's going to grow and provide them money later. If you focus on just trying to lure investors with hooks until they bite instead of building something, a technology, a community, something that sustains itself on content, what you end up with is a lot of really stupid investors who may have brought a lot of money but they've paid for nothing.
Nobody walks away from that relationship happy.
steemit.com is a front end... the first and most popular especially when people are coming through search engines ... so the point the trending page there needs to reflect the diversity of content is well made.
That will not just be reached by upvoting or downvoting...a redesign of the landing page to show excerpts of trending of a range of topics would help accomplish that.
In the top 10 or so there is a gaming post, a travel vlog, an artist and another travel post. In the top20, thre are a few more artists, a travel post and a photography post. Considering this is 2 days after HF21, 6 hours after HF22, that isn't too bad, is it?
It's a start .. only a start... When I see comments like.. "It's looking good now" .. It tells me that they see the job of downvoting shit off the page as the job.. that is a good start.. now.. curate and upvote varied, good content onto the page. Then it will start to look like a vibrant community to attract attention .. the right kind of attention.
We have steemleo for that????
So investment focused content can only be displayed, and trend, on SteemLeo? gonna need a huge DAO proposal to make sure that SteemLeo gains domain authority and ranking in SERPS then.
Also, how are new visitors supposed to even know about SteemLeo? Isn’t the learning curve already difficult enough? Made difficult enough by Steemians because we assume that most want to know as much of the mechanics than we do, rather than just have a fun relaxing after work time on their device of choice.
News flash: unless you’re going to mine interest data, or use signals from other large data miners, which track users across sites and devices, then trending will always suck. Because value in content is in the eye of the beholder. Tabloid rags sell more than the WaPo.
That is for investing yes, but is not about investing into STEEM. What I'm hoping for is that people who find Steem consider buying into the infrastructure and, I am hoping that the content on Steem can encourage those who are already here to power up into it too.
people won't buy into the infrastructure because there are no users. we won't get new users if we keep putting out this shit. Most often we agree, I think this will be our first :-)
If the interfaces / applications become the onboarding points, then this isn't an issue.
As long as stake weighting is the primary source of ROI via extraction of rewards, we won't have investors in Steem, because profiteering decreases capital gains.
We need to enable investors to get ROI from capital gains in order to get investors. Since almost all the rewards are sniped via stake weighting instead of encouraging the marketing department - content creators - capital gains are as discouraged as the creators.
Experienced investors have a skillset, and it isn't self voting or delegating to bid bots. It's building value into businesses in order to increase the value of the underlying investment vehicle. Steem does not present much opportunity for investors to do that, because whales put that value in their wallets instead.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
Thanks!
Wouldn't it maybe make sense to not already making conclusions after just ONE day right after this HF. Let's first wait two weeks how this turns out and THEN come with conclusions how the Trending page looks like ...
Just saying.
I had a "quick scour around steem" does not deem this a conclusion by any means. but how many people while we wait for how many days will visit steemit and just leave again never to return because thats the bullshit we want to show them
Exactly. With SMTs, we can have communities, similar to tribes, around a specific topic or multiple topics, and those can be rewarded with their own currency. But Steem should reward mostly content that is valuable for Steem or at least relevant IMO. People still confuse Steemit with Steem and maybe having a trending page that is displaying what Steem actually is, will help.
its not a confusion on steem 'vs steemit for me. its a rather easy distinction. but like it or not, steemit is still the main face of steem when it comes to blogging and creative content.
Content valuable for steem. how would you define that? and what seperates that from what should be funded via SPS
You're a Steem veteran. Of course the confusion around steem vs steemit is not a problem for you ;)
Content that is worth enough in return for possible sell-pressure to be generated. Many people are saying that whales, early miners & steemit inc. are creating the most sell pressure. And that's somewhat true (I've never seen freedom powering down), but there is still sell-pressure being generated by the inflation from the reward pool. And most investors won't just throw money away if it's not giving something in return.
I didn't really expect that the SPS would be that hard to get funding from, at least at this point of time, but it is. And it's actually great. Because already, some proposals have been submitted with ridiculous amount of sums. And it's important to keep the threshold high, so good proposals will receive funding.
Now, this is where "content valuable for Steem" comes into play, as it doesn't require some kind of threshold. Instead, everybody can vote on the said post and will receive the payout after 7 days. However, the payout is not guaranteed. On the SPS, if your proposal is approved and stays approved, you'll get a guaranteed amount of SBD.
Do project updates not get cashed out? and devs don't fund their projects with the rewards pool? you have never seen freedom power down because he makes enough from leasing he does not have too.....I don't see that being powered up very fast, do you? Yes there is sell pressure from inflation, and shitty spammers and content. but fuck all is really going to good content in the general schemes of things. we wont attract good content creators if they come to steem and thing they gotta write about steem. and thats how trending looks.
Im not sure I am seeing a resonsable arguement on how trending looks good or even better.
That's the trending page on youtube.
The over concern about trending has been going on for almost 4 years.
"Good enough is eough"
I would tend to agree. but I am a marketeer/content creator and writing stuff on topics where people get emotional or that touches on peoples pain points is good for traffic and the strategy works time and time again.
People like to stay narrow and focus on the pain points they have without seeing what else lays out there. Three years of distribution of Steem and this is where we are, time to consolidate the resources to who is looking long.
we have been consolidating a long time now, more like a hefty recession than a consolidation. I have always been positive and have spent much time focusing on the good, upselling steem, reinforcing positivity and reasons to be here.
My personal pain point is my reduction in vote value. the bigger pain point for steem is that it is ghost town and with trending like that, we wont attract invstors or creators. there is nothing left to consolidate....those who are long are the same ones that remained long after hf20. we havent attracted many more long looker since.
Where are you seeing this because it seems to me that mine has increased about 10%
right there on that one I slapped you....14 cent at 100%,
Which proves......those with more stand to gain more......
hmm, seems steemworld hasn't updated, nor has Busy as that shows increased. @steemchiller?
steemnow by @penguinpablo shows the lower amount
I mentioned this to asher the other day but didn't check it.
Since SteemWorld can't know which post we will vote on, it currently shows the estimated value for a vote on a post that already got 20 STEEM.
So, if one votes a comment that doesn't have much rshares already, the green line would be somewhere on the left of the curve and the vote's amount would be much less (can be -50%). Optimal would it be to have a new setting/slider on SteemWorld, where we can choose what we want to see.
Edit
As I saw, the shown amounts in the account operations and the votes overview are really not correct currently. Will fix that today. Many things on my list...
That's what's been going on, the consolidation of all Steem into fewer and fewer wallets. That's the death of a market, and a big part of why the price of Steem has gone down and isn't going up.
1.2 million accounts and 7000 posted since HF21. Do the math. The hemorrhage of users is the hemorrhage of Steem price. We don't need to consolidate. We need to distribute.
These numbers are pretty useless considering that most of those 1.2 million accounts are alts with some users literally having 1000's of accounts.
Also, there is something like a million in Steem held at S-E to back the distribution of SCOT tokens. People seem to conveniently forget that there are more tokens being distributed on Steem, than Steem and SBD and, SMTs will push this out even further.
There is 130 million Steem liquid, and only 26 million coming out of the pool over the next year and that amount will drop.
Yesterday, there were ~10,000 posts, ~27,000 comments and ~38,000 accounts transacting on the Steem blockchain.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/daily-steem-stats-report-friday-august-30-2019
We can discuss the numbers, but the point is that retention is horrible because stake weighting captures the rewards that are necessary to encourage content creation and drive Steem price up. HF21 dramatically increases the impact of stake weighting, and as a result the problems Steem social media suffers due to stake weighting are going to be dramatically increased as well.
Moving rewards from creation to curation does not demonetize bid bots at all. All bot operators need to do is pass some of their curation rewards on to compensate. Once that is done bid bots are more powerful than ever, due to the new rewards curve. It is the basic failure to encourage capital gains versus profiteering that actually creates dismal retention, not at what point profiteering extracts the rewards, that matters.
@paulag estimates her vote is ~25% of what it was before HF21, and Imma accept her estimate since I can't be bothered to calculate it. That means she can deliver but a quarter of the financial incentive to create content and engage with it she could when user retention was dismal and collapsing the market for Steem. Regardless of whether she retains 15% or 35% of her encouragement ability, the fact that it is dramatically reduced means that user retention is dramatically discouraged - from the point at which it was already existentially bad.
Consolidation of Steem is the problem, not the solution. The fewer users there are with Steem, the lower the price of Steem will fall. Consider what the price of Steem will be when the ultimate consolidation has occurred: one account has all the Steem. The price will be 0, because there will be no market for it.
Pogo famously said 'We have met the enemy, and it is us.' Profiteers are the enemy of Steem, and sadly have essentially all of it.
Quit sucking all the value out of the underlying investment vehicle - Steem - and we'll see potential capital gains instead of your fattening pile of tokens, worth ever less than they were the week before.
Social media shouldn't be confined to some topic, like crypto currency, because that excludes all the other values society has. People, not bots, are the elements of social media that matter, and you are replacing them for personal gain.
Personal loss really, since you're killing the value of Steem by doing so. I haven't looked today. What's it down to? What is your capital loss today? When you get tired of gaining a bigger pile of smaller tokens, consider being an investor instead of a profiteer. Build something up instead of sucking it down.
That's what investors do, and you are why there aren't any here.
If you haven't seen it already, I think you will find the discussion that I've had over the last couple of days on the announcement of one of the big failures of HF 21 to be interesting.
I'm not exactly sure how anyone fought that Trending would improve under the new more linear reward architecture. Seriously, it takes even more emphasis away from being rewarded for creating new content and puts more emphasis on trying to get the right vote bet in on content that you know is going to be voted up by a whale. Simultaneously, it makes less rewarded content (and the vast amount of content on the platform is rewarded at less than $20, as you know from running the numbers on a regular basis) even less rewarded, meaning that it is ultimately even more pointless to vote for anything except for what you know to be one of the big topics that the whales want to talk about.
Anyone who sat down and thought about this change in architecture for 15 minutes in relation to what people actually do would know that it will lead to less diversity of content, less creation of content, and more racing to try and get the first vote on content which has no relation to quality but which you know big players are going to vote on.
And in the midst of all this, they gave away free downvotes – a mechanism that requires you to deliberately go find content you don't want and downvote on it. Most reasonable users don't find that much content that they don't want or that they think shouldn't be rewarded because the whole point of a social network is to go out and find content that makes you happy, not spend your time digging in the mud for crap. The only thing most users are going to run into after they settle into a set of feeds are comfortable with is comment spammers – and that is about the smallest fry you can ever imagine trying to swat the swarms of.
No, the underlying ideas are essentially broken and of the incentivization mechanics are getting exactly what they are designed to get.
I am neither thrilled nor excited.
As you pointed out before the HF, however, it is too soon after this particular round of debacles to see how the economy is going to shake out. I don't have a lot of hope, but we'll see.
Judging from the market value of STEEM, the people with money to play with words really excited about the likely payoffs, either. You would think there would be a little pick up if the big players figured there might be a gain after the fork. And yet – that is exactly what we didn't see happen.
Considering that the big investors have the most to gain and access to inside information that the rest of us don't come the steadfast refusal of the market to get better, even on a short-term basis, told me everything I needed to know.
oh @lextenebris I do fear, as always, you are correct. However, having not enough skin in the game means there is not much I can do nor say. well I can say what I want but you know what I mean. I'm an optimistic person, and I have been pro-change and pro steem. But the lights are fading. Proof of brain, I feel is failing with a Z..... we are told this is untrue and the aim was to distribute steem, for which it is doing ..ehemmmm......other concepts such as proof of attention would also prove difficult. I would love to be able to offer some sort of solutions or alternatives instead of moaning, but I really dont know what the best way forward is.
In the meantime, enjoy the vote, because I would rather vote great comments and engagement than a flag to redistribute from small sp holders to large.
"Proof of anything" is perhaps not the right approach to understanding or building out a social media-focused platform. Maybe you could go with something like "proof of interest" because that is effectively what users do simply by interacting with your platform and engaging with content that they enjoy, but then you have the bigger question of "what does that interest mean?"
And really, that shakes out to "what should we do with that signal from the user?" On other more successful social media platforms, they take that signal and use it to try and surface more content which the user will be as interested in, which provides a positive feedback loop which keeps the user engaged with the platform because they are getting something they want. Incidentally, that happens to generate a useful profile about that user which helps target advertisement they also might be interested in and act as another source of revenue for the platforms. I don't see that as necessarily a negative because it's an inevitability of actually doing the job well. You will build up an idea of what that user wants and likes and what you do with that information is on you.
"Proof of brain" never worked. Never. It was never a proof of brain anything. It never proved anything. There has been entirely too much automatically generated content which has been greatly rewarded on the platform to believe at any point that the signals users were giving to the system identified a thing created by a brain. That is not only true of content, but of curation activity.
So we can toss that one out up front.
The Steem blockchain has an inherent disadvantage, one that I've written before about at significant length and I'm sure you've read that post even though it's about two years old at this point. The basic assumption of how things are valued on the platform is top-down authoritarian. Proof of stake (i.e., the more SP you have the more anything you do matters), coupled with what is essentially a might makes right means of determining what is "most popular," just ends up with large stakeholders determining what's popular or at least what is seen as popular by the system, and with very little that the vast majority of small stakeholders can do that makes a difference to their personal experience.
I have suggested some fairly radical things in the past, but the bare minimum that Steemit Inc. needs to do is to decouple the personal experience of the user on the blockchain from this idea of "what is authoritatively popular." They have done their level best to avoid doing anything that reflects the user as an individual on anything that they touch. They have pushed all of that down to application developers, most of which have been infected with the idea that an authoritarian system still defines what is best for everybody.
What needs to happen is a decent, modern featured social network platform with what is considered the very basic set of requirements to retain users, i.e. the ability to self aggregate in common communities for free, quick account creation, a system that learns from what they like and dislike and goes out of its way to try and surface content they're going to like, all of the basics – with the Steem blockchain underneath to act as a secondary "minigame" if you will for adding value by letting people engage in token exchanges.
Or, more succinctly, somebody needs to treat the social media platform part of the thing as the most important part, way more important than the cryptocurrency part. Because nobody needs another cryptocurrency. They could use another really reasonable social media platform that is distributed, resistant to censorship, and all the rest.
If you want to go see someone at least trying to do a good job at it, go check out Gab – which in six months has gone from being its own microverse standalone server to building off Mastodon, working into being a distributed federated server network, implementing entirely new community features into a platform that never had them before, and generally – despite some technical issues which they are still fighting with – did so in under six months.
That is how you fail better faster at a rate that lets you shake the bugs out of the system at a terrifying rate and be completely open source on top of it. You don't even have to appreciate the kind of content that tends to be there to recognize that they are doing the kind of platform development Steemit Inc. had the opportunity to three years ago and could've had those millions of interactions the whole time.
(Though if you're interested in the kind of writing I do on that platform, you are more than welcome to come and check it out.)
I would much rather vote for great content, great comments, and engagement that makes me feel like I'm getting somewhere and spend my time hunting down content I don't enjoy in order to put flags on it. I think that accurately represents how most people would like to engage with things. Not acknowledging that is one of the core failings of the blockchain as it currently stands, and it's one that makes me the saddest.
This.
I need to go look at Gab. I have been looking in detail at the papers on other social type blockchains trying to come up with solutions and best combinations. I must say, Lino have done a good job with dlive( although I'm sure there are some flaws)
You should definitely take a look at it, but be aware it is not related to a blockchain. From a technological perspective, they are coming at things from the "semi-distributed anti-censorship" technology side of the world, and both as developers and as a community that gives them a very, very different feel.
(Not the least reason being that a lot of the population is built up of people who for good reasons or bad have been displaced/kicked off the more mainstream social media platforms, so they tend to be rather extreme examples of their social personality type. As long as you are fully aware that you're going to fall into that mess, you can find the people who are interesting to follow what they're saying and feel comfortable being liberal with blocking people who are Holocaust deniers, Q-anon conspiracy geeks, hard-core feminists, or what have you. I tend to be a hard-core freedom of speech maximalist Libertarian when I write about political and social issues, so I accept that I am where I am.)
The problem with DLive is, surprisingly, not the technology – even though the last time I tried to use it myself it blew up spectacularly and was a complete failure. It's been about a year since I bothered to give it a go. No, the problem with DLive is that they are trying to compete in a space where the network effect is one of the most important things about a platform and may have not much in the way of traction to make that happen. If I start broadcasting Oxygen Not Included right now, and play for six hours straight, I might have one or two viewers who aren't really interested in what I'm doing, they are just changing channels. If I do it on Twitch, I'm going to have eight or 10 viewers, the bulk of which know what game I'm playing and want to see what I'm doing.
That is a big deal for streamers. It is very difficult to drive traffic to a longform stream that isn't already on the platform. I respect what they're trying to do but my expectations are low.
At least, however, they are trying to do something.
Your post as an observation of what went on is going on, and all the reply's does show that some people understand it. I have very few down votes to my name, maybe two or three I handed out in two years for plagiarism. I do not see my habits changing very much when it comes to down votes, I look for and read things I like, I'm not an investor, I am a user, I see no purpose in looking for things I don't like, and down voting them, just in the hopes that stuff I do like will get better rewards.
I read your linked post, it is nice to see someone else who gets it.
:-) looks like only the large stakeholders are really the only ones going to change their ways, after all its already in their nature to protect their interest, so they are not changing their nature.
It's early days, and right after a hard fork it's hard to expect the most popular posts to be talking about anything other than Steem.
I get what you meant, though, the front page of reddit isn't just talking about reddit and my facebook feed isn't just zuckerberg's face.
Still, bid bots are no longer entirely unchallenged and it doesn't feel like I'm just throwing money in the bin every time I vote for someone else or not selling my vote. It'll take time but hopefully things will get better from here.
I think this is a good point
I feel @paulag's frustration, but I also see @tarazkp's point as well. With the growing number of tribes, a user can find a trending page that matches their interest and long-term goals.
sure im talking about steem myself. that does not mean its worthy of trending. 10K+ people a month see steem because of me. I should be on trending every day so.
as for bidbot, people are crazy. Steem and money make people think weird thing. since when should promote something be a revenue-generating exercise? Promotion costs in the real world. Bit bots are a promotional tool and anyone with a bit of cop on will still use them. it would cost them more to promote on google so its still a good deal (although there is way more traffic from google)
Getting paid to promote is unfortunately the market telling us that exposure here is, if not worth less than nothing, at least worth less the value of the vote when half of the rewards are subject to a mean locking period of 6.5 weeks. Basically the free market is telling us that our platform sucks and exposure on here isn't worth shit.
I believe the main reason was the broken economy which the last hardfork attempted to fix. I'm optimistic that it will be at least partially successful. There are other reasons too of course, but having an economic system that punished honest voting was the chief culprit imo, and hopefully this less so the case.
Can you please let me know that why you have heavily downvoted my post here: https://steemit.com/gaming/@siddartha/claim-your-free-hero-in-an-upcoming-blockbuster-crypto-game
I created an original content and reviewed a game. Not sure what is to downvote in that. I have always appreciated your content, especially when you used to write those longer posts filled with satire and Asian jokes!! Not sure, when I pissed you off to see you the biggest downvoter on my post. In fact, I have almost never got a downvote on Steemit in past 2 years. And now after a long while I write a post, and a trail of downvoting follows me. What has changed?
The economics have changed since the last hardfork and it's no longer as expensive fighting abusive voting behavior.
I don't believe a vote buying system that pays people to advertise is in the best interests of this platform. People who profited from buying votes in the past unchallenged now run the risk of getting burned, and in doing so should think twice about purchasing votes in the future.
Not sure how me using bidbots to make my post more visible is an abusive behaviour. Whales can self upvote their posts to make their posts seen, but minnows don't have that opportunity. So some of us have to use bidbots for that. It's not that I'm making some lame content and just getting it artificially upvoted to earn money. I have in fact stopped posting for a while now. But whenever I do write, I want it to be seen and not just vanish into the darkness. Bidbots is a great way to do that. If a section of steemians don't want bidbots, then they should discuss this with bot owners instead. Instead of grinding us minnows in between. This only increases toxicity in the community. You want more people to use Steem or even less.
Seeing this coming from a popular content creator kinda surprises me. If tomorrow a meme post of urs gain hundreds of $, would you downvote it or like if someone else downvoted just coz they feel it is overrewarded.
The irony is that we have anarchists in here who don't want government, police or army and then they try to dictate and police whenever given a chance. Anyways, thanks for the explanation. Peace.
You can use bidbots. I'm free to downvote posts that use them and make it less profitable for them and their delegates to maintain a profitable enterprise which I believe undermines honest voting and harms this ecosystem as a whole.
Well, that's fine. But I do have to say that in crypto world, profits is the main motivation for most people. If people can profit a bit from the ecosystem, then they are more inclined to invest and lock their cryptos. Making it unprofitable for bitbot projects and their delegates will only drive them to dump their stash even more. I didn't use bidbots for profit, but when people like me see that I can't make my posts more visible then it will certainly discourage me to choose steemit as the first platform for posting my content. Anyways, I hope your efforts work.
How are you tracking that "10k+ people a month see steem" becuase of you? I'm not questioning the accuracy of your statement, just trying to learn how to track that sort of thing myself. We used to see some view statistic on our posts here, although my understanding is that is was removed due to inaccuracy. When it did exist, though, I could see lots of views on my posts long after the 7 day payout period. And I even had people join Steemit just so they could leave me a comment.
Reddit is also not giving away money nor is it based on a currency. The idea might have been for Steemit to be the crypto-Reddit, but things run very differently once money is in play.
"the idea might have been"......so solid, sorry!
Of course
Other social media can take for granted the one thing we have to work really hard for: honest voting.
Without the money we don't have a competitive edge. With it, we need to solve the tendency for stakers to siphon back their own voting rewards.
But I don't think that just because it's about money means it's helpful for the ecosystem as a whole for most of the content to be about the platform itself, although it's expected at the start. Baby steps.
Do tell.
Flagging trending posts only to get Steem-related posts on trending feels like a bad idea...
However, nothing with HF21 (so far) according to me is to bring in new people. It looks like the "safest" way to keep the investors happy... And maybe, at HF23, we'll see something that is done for the lesser accounts, and we can start to on board new people.
I won't be flagging much either, because truth to be told, I don't see how it would benefit anyone else besides the large- and established accounts.
I also face the risk of retaliation flags, so my downvotes would ultimately free up some tiny extra rewards for large accounts to earn, and I could end up with less than I already have... And what I have been able to earn has already decreased.
I don't have any stats for it, but it also looks like upvotes on comments have decreased, which is basically the exact opposite of what we should do, in case we are trying to encourage people to engage.
Nah, I was skeptical before HF21, and I am still skeptical. I still can't see how any of this would help Steem in general. Looks like the perfect HF to make the rich even richer though, but to an even greater expense of lesser accounts.
Indeed. Now you have to flag if you want to use all your voting power and get the reward potential from your account each day because part of the upvoting power relative to a reward pool has been diverted to flagging. If you flag those posts on trending to get your rewards for flagging each day, then people with more SP might flag you back on your posts. You might get rewards for flagging, but lose for for being flagged on a post. Meanwhile, those with lots of SP can flag without much worry of retaliation. And the less everyone else flags, the more the higher SP holders flags reward them (just like if only they were upvoting, they would get all the curation rewards).
hold on, rewind.......
are you saying if we flag, we get a portion of the rewards removed, do all the rewards not go back to the rewards pool?
I think what he's saying is that no matter what you flag, the portion of the rewards that are removed go back into the rewards pool – but odds are that the person that you flag has other posts awaiting vote payout, so in theory you are rewarding everything else that the person that you flag has written or produced that isn't that specific thing that you have flagged.
I would go a step further and point out that when you flag something, you are literally taking the rewards that you have control of from the reward pool and giving them to literally everybody else – including every bad actor that you couldn't catch or didn't have the SP to do anything about.
This is one of the core problems with the entire idea of downvoting as a means of community management that I have been talking about for quite a while. It doesn't matter how much SP you have if you are literally just rewarding every other wrongdoer or bad piece of content anytime you flag something. Ultimately you're just making your life harder because your rewarding more things that you don't want then you are hurting things that you don't want.
In theory, you're also rewarding things that you do want but odds are good that the vast bulk of contents on the blockchain is stuff you either don't care about and thus don't want to reward or stuff that you don't want and thus don't want to reward, and only a narrow slice of it is stuff that you like and want to reward.
Upvotes are far more focused and useful tools than downvotes have ever been.
They just dragged us back to 2016.
Congratulations stinc and witnesses
2016 was better, although I was not here lol
I meant trending page. We saw this already and nobody liked it.
In my opinion with this HF they killed steem.
I still think it's a bit too early to tell, but so far, I agree with you.
I didn't care for the Trending Tab before and I won't change my habits. I'd rather give my votes to a post that has 0 upvotes than to any of those trending authors.
High five dude. maybe all the curators have turned to the dark side and would rather flag now than reward.
Some downvoting. Far more upvoting.
And it is a bit silly to have so much Steemit only content on trending but hopefully at some point an organic variety will show. For some reason though, people drool all over steem posts, even yours today!
I will flag this post myself if it makes trending
Then troll yourself!
If it makes trending organically, you earned it, it's yours, have it. This entertainment industry stuff is a confusing world. Even the most famous folks around go home and wonder why the hell people like their stuff so much. Accept it, roll with it, don't let it get to your head, and never sell yourself short.
That's easy to explain, however.
A vote is not a signal that you like content. You would prefer that it was. I would prefer that it was. I think most of us involved with this particular post would prefer that it was. But that is not what it is.
An upvote is a bet that someone after you is going to upvote that post. That's all it is. If you are correct, you receive a curation payout, not because the content was good or because you enjoyed it, but because you could accurately predict what a large number of other people were going to do. Moreover, the creator gets a very token amount if a lot of people decide that they think other people are going to vote for that content. (And in fact, the creator gets less now under hard fork 22 than they did under HF 20.) That means that it is far more valuable to simply find what other people are going to vote for than it is to create content that other people are going to vote for.
So what happens when everybody is trying to decide what everybody else is going to vote for? Well, you see exactly what we have – a pressure toward unifying the topics and subjects that are being voted for. It's as inevitable as the tides. But because the whole point is to guess what other people are going to vote for to the real exclusion of caring about the content in terms of how much you enjoy it or like it, and every body is experiencing the same pressure, everybody starts voting for the same kind of content. The easiest, cheapest, most quickly discernible content they can find. Inevitably, that is masturbatory content. It's easy to search, it's easy to tag, and it's easy to produce. On top of that, you get a consolidation among creators. Since there's no real way to get income from doing any other kind of creation, you get more of the same stuff being made, and since everybody wants to vote with everybody else, you get more the same stuff being voted for.
It is a direct, straight line expectation given the axioms of the system.
I wish it wasn't.
I vote for content I like.
I've been here three years. Have you seen my blog? I do whatever the hell I want and for three years I've avoided following the herd. I'm doing fine, plus it would be difficult to copy me. Happy with the results most days.
This platform is what we make of it. We all have our own way of seeing it. I can't say I subscribe to your vision.
i am actually not interesting in Trending but in the FEATURED page, how do i get there? :)
Now we talking, I mean sure HF sorted out reward bashing through bid bots but the trending offers way too much real estate and exposure to something that offers very little value. I do like steempeaks version where you can few curation trails, it reminds me a lot of mediums homepage which I think does a reasonable job of promoting content and getting people deeper down the rabbit hole
have to agree with you in regards to Medium. The front page as a visitor gives a variety of topic posts and as a member I see posts both by people I don't follow and people in my network being featured.
Glad someone agrees with me! I think a homepage is something completely separate from a feed page
In my mind a homepage should be snippets of various things
Then you can still have a click to a deeper trending feed!
It’s something I plan to mess around with soon when I get time to set up A tribe
Might it be even worse now? :0)
shit why?
It was at least varied but shit before. Now it's like a massive echo chamber for witnesses and Devs
lol thought you were going to tell me because this post made it. lol, it did if you scroll down far enough. yeps its shitter than before
Lol, fuck no! That would be awfully rude. I like you Paula!
lol its ok, if I take the piss I got to be able to take it too. Me likes you too 💚💚💚💚💚💚
:0D
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