Steem post promotion: Past, present, and future
A reminder about Steem's "Promoted post" feature for authors and investors.
Introduction
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A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, @steemitblog published the post Introducing Promoted Content, which introduced the notion of promoted posts to the Steem blockchain. In short, anyone can promote a post by sending some amount of SBD with an @author/permlink in the memo field to the @null account - effectively burning that amount of SBD, and the promoted post will appear in the /promoted feed. The posts in this feed are sorted by promotion amount, so the higher the transferred amount, the closer the post gets to the top of this list.
Unfortunately, curators in the past did not provide much support for this feature, and it fell out of use. Now, I guess it has been mostly forgotten by the current generation of Steemizens.
I was reminded of this, today because of the post Steemit Engagement Challenge Week # 4 | Propose A New Steemit Project| Steem Burn by @rosz. I didn't actually read the post, because of the language, but I hope I get the gist of it based on the comment from @steemcurator01:
Good idea.
You can actually burn STEEM by setting a beneficiary to @null.
Maybe we should encourage people to burn STEEM this way by giving more votes...?
Say 25% beneficiary to start.
Some months ago, I had tried to make use of the promotion feature, but failed. Apparently, I had forgotten exactly how the transfer had to be constructed and I wrongly concluded that the feature had been disabled. Today, though, I tracked down the original announcement and I was able to make use of it to promote two posts:
So the point of this post is to remind everyone of the existence of promoted posts, to point out how they can be useful to authors and investors, and to make some suggestions for improving the feature.
Promoted posts for authors
I suppose this is obvious, but it's a matter of visibility. If we have a new generation of curators who are committed to watching the /promoted feed, the author can increase their audience and their upvotes by making use of the feature.
At this moment, if someone wants to bump themself to the top of the feed, it will cost them 2.6 SBD. This is a clear benefit for any author who is trying to build an audience or communicate an important idea.
Promoted posts for investors
In short, using this feature requires authors or promoters to burn SBD. It's important to know that we can also promote posts by others.
We can see the importance of this by looking at how well the TRX token has held up in the current bear market for cryptocurrency. My strong suspicion is that this is - in large part - because of their token burning economics, which can be seen from tronscan.org:
From this, it seems clear to me that investors should encourage the burning of SBD through the use and expansion of the promoted post feature by authors, curators, and developers.
Improvements needed
Pixabay license, Source
Now, for the bad news. Promoted posts already fell out of use once, and there must have been a reason for that. In my opinion, the reason is that curators tend not to remember to follow a special link for promoted posts, and readers are especially unlikely to visit a list of sponsored content every day, so some improvements are definitely in order. What are they?
First and foremost, investors must see to it that curators are properly committed to supporting promoted posts (without compromising on quality standards). Curators will also need to figure out how to balance this with participation in other initiatives like club5050, etc...
In my opinion, a second key improvement would be to give prominent visibility to promoted posts by putting them in prime real estate on the Steemit.com web page and/or interleaving them into the various feeds.
Finally, developers of other Steem web sites could also dedicate a section of their screen real estate to displaying the promoted posts.
Ultimately (IMO), upvotes are nice, but the real purpose of post promotion should be audience building. So we should all find ways to help that happen.
Conclusion
In closing, I'm also in full support of the idea by @steemcurator01 to reward people for setting a benficiary through use of the @null beneficiary setting and #burnsteem25 tag, but I think we should also consider resurrecting the /promoted feed.
What do you think?
Thank you for your time and attention.
As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".
Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.
Maybe this is just semantics, but I think it's a mistake to call this "burning". It's really unclear to me if burning, in-and-of-itself, actually does anything good for a token. You could even make the case that someone burning a token is sending a signal to the world "This is worth $0". But the promoted post feature isn't necessarily doing that, it's you buying something from the blockchain, so the signal is "Having extra visibility is worth X SBD to me".
As I understand it, the usual argument in favor of burning is the assumption that overall market cap represents the total valuation, so eliminating some tokens from the supply should increase the price because overall valuation won't change. The analogy is presumably a stock buyback (or maybe some things that central banks do). But I think the key there is the buy in the buyback, the price goes up because there are buyers in the market. So sure, the thing disappears from the market, but I wonder if that's more of a side effect than a causal factor. (If we wanted something similar, with a central agent buying tokens and disappearing them, a DAO-funded bot could do that).
That's my understanding too. The market cap remains unchanged but the number of tokens in circulation decreases, therefore increasing the unit price of each token.
I have (and you probably have too) seen a lot of discussion about the SBD that go to the DAO get burned - I think that this idea is being seriously discussed by those that can make it happen but I haven't been following it closely.
I haven't seen much actual discussion, I've seen some vague references to things happening behind the scenes (although maybe I'm not looking in the right places). So my (perhaps cynical) expectation is that at some point a half-thought-through change will be sprung on everybody at which point it will be too late to ask questions or point out problems.
Personally I think it would make sense for those Steem DAO SBDs to be used to buy Steem, thus raising the price of Steem and dropping the price of SBDs. Burning the Steem at that point might not be terrible (although seems wasteful to me, seems like it would be better if it ended up as SteemPower in the hands of people who use it to make the chain a better place, but finding a fair way to identify who that would be is not a simple question).
This rings a bell and might be what's being discussed. It feels like a long time since I last heard about it though - hopefully it's still a possibility.
That's always been my mindset too but there will always be problems finding the people who improve the chain. So often, it's the people who earn their way into Steemit's trust and get access to booming support or steemcurator accounts who find the temptation too much and start creating and upvoting their own accounts.
Yes, I would say that too.
But it improves the ratio to the STEEM, which then has an impact on the debt ratio.
The best thing for the debt ratio would probably be for the price of SBDs to drop below $1 USD so it makes sense for people to do conversions.
If SBD falls under $1, there would be bots buying SBD from the open market, wait for the 3-day conversion window and repeat the same. Like, no one would let the opportunity like that pass. I think we need to get it to be stable at the dollar price.
Regardless of the source, when there is buy pressure what happens to the price? This is the mechanism that keeps the price near $1 (from below, at least): SBDs priced at <$1 are valuable, so people should want them (slight caveat: the haircut rule is also a factor). It is a distributed, decentralized mechanism. It doesn't work when the price is >$1 because there's no reason to do conversions. Doing conversions would take the SBDs out of circulation and the debt ratio would get better.
Yeah, the language is tricky. It's the same thing with "burning" on TRX. If I understand, that's actually transaction fees and something to do with USDD minting. So the account owners are actually paying for a service from the blockchain. On the other hand, in both cases, I guess the blockchain really is burning them.
It's ironic that promoted post usage died out when the @burnpost experiment had so much curator support.
Technically, the SBD "disappear" from the system. Whether you want to call this "burning" or "booking out" is probably a matter of preference.
All transferred SBD are set back to 0 with the next block. In addition,
current_sbd_supplyis reduced by the amount andvirtual_supplyis reduced accordingly.In the current phase, this would be particularly important, as it would then reduce the debt ratio again.
However, for this to have a noticeable effect, quite a lot of SBD would have to be "burnt"...
If the price rises as a result, this has an additional positive effect on the debt ratio.
Finally. A real service that is sold for tokens that are then burned. Time will tell whether this service will be in demand. But I have long dreamed that this will be realized ☺️
I commented on your comment on the post that inspired this one before reading this post. So my other comment pretty much says what you already know - sorry about that!
It would be good if the 2 ideas/approaches could work together somehow so that people don't feel the need to set a 25% beneficiary as well as transfer SBD to @null. This could be as simple as sc01 visiting the /promoted page and people like us increasing awareness (i.e. including a note / comment / "promotion" at the end of each post to say "I am promoting this to steemit.com/promoted via a SBD token burn - learn more (with a link to more information)).
One thing is niggling away in the back of my mind (which I'd be interested in your thoughts on) - although we'd be helping to increase the price of the STEEM/SBD tokens, users of voting bots (for example) won't be "sacrificing" anything and could "disproportionally" benefit from our community spirit 👈 This is badly articulated but hopefully you get the gist.
#burnsteem25 would support the analogy of "75% of something (i.e. a potential sc01 upvote) is better than 100% of nothing".
/promoted posts will only work if we create an audience.
I'm getting good at repeating what you've said aren't I 😆
Another interesting distinction is that with the /promoted posts, the same person can promote the same post multiple times. As a result, "bidding wars" would sometimes develop between people who were competing to stay at the top.
For that reason, high stakes curators might want to vote late in the payout window, in order to let people bid the articles as high as possible. Once a whale vote is thrown, the bidding stops, I guess.
I've not tested - are the bids added together, so a bid of $1 on top of an already $1 bid would set it at $2?
My thinking was perhaps the opposite - once a whale vote is thrown in, there's more "money in the pot" to bid even more (or invest that money in their next post).
IIRC, yes, that's how it works.
I agree that a whale vote would lead to future promotion, but on the present post, I guess it depends if they're motivated by visibility or by rewards. If they're seeking visibility, then you could be right.
It's been interesting watching the activity over the past few days - snice sc01's comment. There are already over 300 posts that have @null set as a 25% beneficiary but almost no posts that have "promoted" their posts via some SBD burning.
What this says to me is that people are using the #burnsteem25 hashtag solely to get the attention of sc01, knowing that if the vote doesn't come, they've not "sacrificed" anything.
I continue to watch with interest 👀
I agree. The "out of wallet" requirement seems to be a big barrier to entry.
Any idea where to find documentation on how to write a browser plugin? I'd like to have something that highlights posts in my feed if they have a null beneficiary set or if they have a non-zero promotion cost...
I can't imagine that it would be very hard, but I have no idea where to start.
Update:
I figured out how to create a browser extension and use it to find the beneficiary and Promotion Cost strings. Now I just need to figure how to do something useful with it.
Ah, I was about to reply and just saw your update.
If it's any help, I've got a webpage hosted that shows all of the active authors/posts which have beneficiaries set, what percentage and the pending payout. I don't want to share it publicly but if you have Discord, I can share it with you there - the-gorilla#4289
It sounds like you're half way there. You should be able to navigate the DOM from one of those strings and implement some inline styles - you might not even need to do any DOM hopping and just replace the string that you've found with the exact same string + some inline styling.
I wanted to work on this plugin so I can make "promoted" posts stand out visually in other feeds besides /promoted and #burnsteem25. It's interesting that it has the opposite effect in #burnsteem25, too. It's easy to tell if someone forgot the beneficiary setting.
Not quite what I'm going for. There's a recursion thing going on that I need to work through. But, I'm getting closer. ;-)
Update: And closer still:
I totally agree. I am doing both for my posts today, just to play around, but I'm definitely not going to make a practice of it. I'm even thinking that 25% might be too much to ask from most authors. It will be interesting to see how things shake out, but, I definitely think that curators should support both initiatives.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that too. I don't have a strong feeling, but one hope is that maybe some of the high-stakes investors would rather switch to an initiative like this in order to see their holdings grow in value, instead of relying on incoming distributions that are constantly whittling away at the value of their starting stake. It's hard to predict, though.
Yes and no. I've had this conversation offline but for those authors who earn nothing anyway, the potential of getting a sc01 upvote - even a small one - far outweighs the small sum that they're currently earning. They could burn 25% for 100 posts and if they get 1 hit, they'll earn more than they currently do.
This is starting to show in its usage already. At the time of this comment, 124 posts have set @null to a beneficiary of 25% (or greater for the fat fingered 52%-ers). The posts will either earn nothing (and therefore burn nothing) or get an sc01 upvote and burn something.
I've read some thoughts that the only way to make this meaningful is if Steemit (as the largest sole stakeholder) burn a large quantity of their STEEM. Which I'd be amazed to see happen.
Something's better than nothing and since burning STEEM / SBD was probably the first conversation we had, I'm surprised to see it happening and wonder if it's a fad for people chasing upvotes which won't last. (It's definitely people chasing upvotes but relies heavily on Steemit for it to be sustained.) Is this the "new clubs" initiative being unofficially launched?
I also don't see Steemit burning their stake, but I don't really agree that it's necessary. Cutting inflation is a nice start, but IMO, what is absolutely necessary is a front end that really rewards people with higher visibility for post promotion. If post promotion comes to provide a real benefit in terms of building an audience, that's when it becomes possible to actually reverse inflation.
I also wonder if it's a fad. We'll see how long it lasts. I have tried setting a null beneficiary on my own a number of times over the years. We even had the Share n Burn community, but I've never seen it get traction like this before.
It shows the power of an sc01 comment. A lot of people watch (and often reply to) every comment so as soon as something's said, it becomes a new "rule" or "initiative" - most people don't care what the objectives of these initiatives are or what the Steemit team's trying to achieve, they'll just do anything to get a vote.
You were the first person who ever mentioned the idea to me (what feels like a long time ago now) and having just watched my "burn ticker" cross the 300 posts mark, the rate of uptake continues to increase.
Here's a baseline. I'm anxious to see what happens to the top graph on Sunday when the beneficiary rewards start rolling in. (SP & VESTS as curation rewards to @null on top, wallet SBD transfers to @null in the middle, wallet STEEM transfers to @null on the bottom)
The first payouts will start on 29th May 5:30pm GMT.
Total Pending Rewards stands at $3631.417 at the time of me writing this comment and presumably it'll be 25% of the 50% author rewards so roughly $450. The number of posts is increasing (we're at over 100 posts per day) but the bigger upvotes are mostly clustered on the 1st day.
Hi @remlaps , the truth is that in this panel I see so much monopoly , that just keep working is what I plan to do , I do not see any change and I have been here a year , monopoly and more monopoly , a post to minute 2 has a value of 03 Ok, and at minute 5 its value is 50 steem, what's the name of this, monopoly, KOREA marks the game and takes the benefits, so you have to work smarter than them, it's my opinion ,look at my wallet if you want, the monopoly bothers me, but I don't let myself be defeated, everything is the opposite
I get it. It's easy to be frustrated by the outsized influence that a handful of accounts seem to have, but you've got the right approach. In the end, my stake size is my stake size, and it really doesn't matter much if the rest of it is scattered among thousands or held by a few. We only have control over our own little spheres of influence, so that's where we should focus our attention.
I didn't know about promoted content, that's good to know.
i hope burn steem with #burnsteem25 by using @null
Thanks for the mention