Make curating great again!
There have been a lot of discussions lately about the curation incentives which are clearly not working as intended... same content and authors trending everyday, no rewards for discovering good content early,etc.
The problem is that the curation algorithm didn't anticipate that people would form small circle and jerk each other off.
And because people are acting selfishly curating has become the least profitable way to make money on steemit.
So how do we realign curation incentives ? Simple, by making curating less predictable and more profitable.
My suggestion is to let authors decide how much rewards they want to allocate to curators.
New authors could chose to give say 80% of the rewards to curators which will make their posts more appealing to voters.
So now you have a good incentive for users to diversify their vote and you also give a fantastic new tool for newbies to get their content discovered. Win win
I believe this could rebalance the whole ecosystem and I'm very curious to know if the SMT protocol will be flexible enough to allow these tweaks.
Curating is supposed to be fun and exciting, let's make it so!
I've suggested the same thing long ago, but recently some people are realized that it could be done without appealing to developets, just by using some simple bot.
On Golos there's an initiative to share autor/curator rewards 50/50 and people using it now distribute about 10% of total reward pool.
As an author you just have to use bot, which calculates rShates received and transfers the corresponding amount GbG back to curators.
Does the bot allow you to change percentage? Like use a different percentage for every of your post..I think its very important to introduce randomness in curation so that people are always incentivized to search for new content.
How many users roughly use this bot? and is there some user friendly interface to interact with it?
Yes, it's possible to change percentage. However it's some sort of "community 50/50" now, so unless you set it on 50+% your post would't be reblogged by "community account" and consequently will get less views. There's at least 100+ people using it . There's also some sort of "customer service".
Like I only use mobile phone for posting and bot is working only on desktop, but I can just send the link for my post to the helper, he will run the bot on my behalf and I will transfer the distributed amount to him after.
Also apart from golos.io there's another client for Golos goldvoice.club which afaik allows setting percentage for "curators cashback"
It's a good initiative but needs to be integrated seamlessly in the UI for all users and devices to adopt it which is why I think it would be better if the steem blockchain allowed for it directly.
Glad I found this article and topic. I am getting really tired to see those "circles"....Curating used to be fun but now I feel I have to compete with bots and also use one myself. Things don't feel right. I don't understand enough about calculations but I enjoyed curating manually much more. I still do and turn off steemvoter once in a while because there are many great authors I would miss out voting for.
I've been beating this drum for awhile. This is a highly inventive option, I really like it. I see no reason not to make this an option to any author that wants to use it.
I strongly suggest you format this as a suggestion and post it via Utopian.io. I've never done it, but I bet this would make a hefty reward.
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@elear/profit-by-contributing-to-steemit-and-open-source-projects-here-s-how
I'm not a coder but I'd be glad if someone build this feature and propose it.
I will try proposing the issue and see how it goes! It's a great idea.
Thank you
turned out well
Agreed and hope to get support and make Steemit great again
That’s an interesting idea. Only changing the game rules can alter the way how the large SP holders curate.
I like the concept, Have an upvote
As a 'non-fan' of the current curation algorithms, I also suggest a complete overhaul is needed. Giving authors more choice in who receives a reward can only serve to increase the size of the circle jerk (friends helping friends). I think it should be set up more like a lotto system where all/any votes has an equal chance of earning. As an example, say you have 10 total upvotes cast on a particular post. 20% of these voters would earn say 50% of the curation reward and the other 8 voters would receive the remaining reward, as a scaled percentage... all randomly selected. After all, all 10 voters DID show up, didn't they? This could mean that the either the first or last voter to show up would have an equal chance of receiving the largest prize. Why should any one of them be favored because they were more "timely" as compared to all other voters? Many of us have "lives" to live and can't simply camp-out at a keyboard to play ring the brass-bell all day long. An upvote is an upvote whether it is cast at post+1min or post=+2days. Personally, I can't read every post from everyone on my feed everyday, all day, let alone interact with them. A random lotto-type set up would encourage more curation and participaton in discussions, increasing one's odds of getting a more fair slice of the reward-pool pie.
What you suggest won't solve the root issue which is that most users on the platform don't vote for new undiscovered content/authors ( because no one vote for them, it's a vicious circle) so even if you change the formula those early curators will still earn peanuts.
Everyone will have equal opportunity to upvote those posts. It would be no different from what it is today aside from the fact that you create a good incentive for people to change their voting habit.
The reason nobody votes is because there is no "real" reward... period! Check out my most recent post.
The reward is in the contents of the posts, the ideas, music etc. The reward is in supporting artists so they can make from the heart and not to appease numerical sequenctions. Since life has no meaning outside of the experiences, if you are only consuming content to try and earn pennies, then you have missed the point 😕
The subject is "curation."
I like this, if you have happened to have checked out some of my latest posts, the one about manual curation vs auto curation it really has become a "front-running eachother with autovotes on posts we know will trend from same authors" while raking in most of the curation rewards cause too few vote manually compared to autovotes.
Was also the reason I made the next post to encourage manual curators to earn more rewards by voting on the OCD nominations knowing my votes will follow - this way I sacrifice some of my own rewards but at least manual curators start making more and in a way taking from the autovote curators.
Will be nice to see some other solutions to this in the future though, and giving out bigger curation rewards on your own posts if you choose so will be very effective. For the record, I've been voting on my own posts a lot later on purpose for a long time now just to make curation rewards more worth it.
I believe an option for authors to chose curators's reward percentage would give an advantage to manual curators over bots or will at least rebalance and give equal earning opportunities.
Bots don't like to adapt to different situations but with this feature they will have to because the percentage that goes to curators could be different for every posts.
So bots voting for the same authors for example will miss better opportunities to earn elsewhere and bots voting only posts with high curation % might lose reputation and money ( post downvoted) because many of these posts will be shit content.
Right and the sad thing is that everyone loses by doing this.
@snowflake As a top 50 witness myself, I want you to know. I absolutely love this idea!!!!!
I like the idea, of authors being able to set the curation rewards on each post. this could absolutely slow down the circle jerking, and slow down the bots.
I am also thinking, possibly, maybe ONLY the author would know what the rewards are set at ? Now of course this would be different then above, because then anytime someone upvotes a post, they have 0 idea on what rewards they receive.
But no matter what, I 100% believe we need to discuss more seriously about changing rewards to whatever the author wants them to be.
This is a serious matter, and I would love to get more discussion going about this.
Thanks for starting this discussion @snowflake
Indeed :-)
Very interesting idea.
This feature could be integrated in the UI in a very user friendly way. For example before submiting their posts, users could be presented with an option to boost their post. A 80% boost means 80% goes to curators, a 50% boost means 50% goes to curators. When you increase rewards for curators you are effectively boosting your post.
Yes, and the upvoter would not know either way. I love the randomness of this idea.
The idea is that curators will know beforehand what percentage a post will give them and they will then vote accordingly.
Say for example a new talented author want to build up his reputation and is more interested in the attention the post gets than the actual rewards. This author can chose to give 100% of the rewards to curators which will draw a lot of voters to it ( only if they are aware that the post will give them 100% of course)
So then votes become attracted to money and not necessarily good content. Curation rewards should be secondary to choosing quality content IMO.