Open Discussion: Fix Trending & Stop Promotion Abuse
We all know that the global trending page is broken.
@heimindanger, recently made a post where he explained his view of how the trending page is broken.
He then tried to rally stake-holders to downvote/flag trending posts which were promoted with several bid-bots / promotion services.
While I understand the reason, I don't believe that the way is effective and good enough. Not all promoted posts deserve to be downvoted!
My opinion is: we should stop those users from buying votes in the first place - instead of using our own votingpower to counter these votes.
Since I run and develop Smartsteem.com - I'm in charge of a big stakeholder bid-bot & promotion service and I'm open to hear your feedback of what needs to change and possible solutions!
Additionally, I'm also willing to fund and work together with services which aim to solve promotion-abuse (e.g. global blacklist etc.)
How about we actually address the real problem: the blockchain protocols that created the current shit show?
HF17 (post reward penalty and 7-day payout), HF18 (delegation), and HF19 (linear rewards and 4x upvote) stripped away most of the mitigation/protections that were in place for identifying and dealing with spam and other abuse. Combined with a reduction in SP requirements for bandwidth, this place has gone full block-spamming with no accountability...and has actually made it lucrative.
Continually trying to treat what are symptoms of the disease rather than curing the disease itself is futile. If nobody wants to acknowledge or address the actual problems with the blockchain protocols that have created this mess, then there’s no point debating the useless “fixes” that people keep proposing.
We all know the problems. Very few people, if anyone at all, is identifying the source. I think maybe it’s time to stop kowtowing to STINC and the incompetent witnesses that do whatever STINC proposes. This blockchain and the culture here is currently f***ed. Don’t you think it’s time to reconsider its direction?
Korean pumps won’t last forever. At some point, people will need to grow a spine and actually DO something about the vast incompetence and ignorance of those in “leadership” roles who control the direction of Steem.
Linear rewards are fundamentally flawed. I pointed this out many times. Here's one. I'll possibly make a whole post about it.
I don't necessarily agree with everything else you said but I do agree with this.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/steemit-winter-update-2017-reflection-our-vision-statement-and-mission-and-a-look-forward#@teamsteem/re-steemitblog-steemit-winter-update-2017-reflection-our-vision-statement-and-mission-and-a-look-forward-20180221t053905349z
Linear rewards still aren't the root of the problem. It's like banning guns, to prevent crime. It doesn't matter much if you're killed with a knife instead of a gun.
The actual root of the problem is failing to incentivize societal virtues other than financial. Stake-weighting is the mechanism that subsumes all other societal virtues to financial holdings. This is the source of almost all societal ills, and not merely Steemit's trending page.
Jesus attacked the moneylenders for this reason.
It's still the reason.
I'd happily give my votes/attention to anyone who can help people see the world as I see it so that their content can reach a wider audience and gain more acceptance or resistance.
Under the current system, it seems the people who will end up with the most Steem will be those who create 10 posts with the help of a bot and upvote those 10 posts leaving everyone at a disadvantage.
The power of the people come from what people put their attention on. This is where the power/value of Steem stem from.
Hard to tell someone to let go of the easy money, they will lose their witness spot to the next guy willing to scam the pay to play setup.
LOL you crazy.. speaking things that make so much sense in a place where nonsense is the standard.
I agree, it's really important for humanity to start getting a blockchain social media right, it's even getting critical now.
I only recently joined, composed 2 posts that were not looked at by anybody, felt like a waste of energy. Wondering what i'm doing wrong and thinking about tipping a bot - how else will people even start to notice the contribution?
You have failed to realize that screaming into a void gains no attention. I've been here almost a year now, and for the most part 3/4 of my rewards come from comments, rather than my posts. I do post, but engaging in discussions is the actual point of social media, not content creation.
It isn't the quality of posts that most matters, but the quality of engagement. Making a post is akin to starting a conversation. Commenting is joining in. Usually the conversations I join are more profound than those I start ;)
Until you have a large following spending a lot of effort making posts isn't going to generate substantial financial rewards. Jumping on the bots doesn't produce useful engagement, and thus isn't much point, at least to me. I've never bothered, because I'm not here to make money, but to escape censorship and propaganda infesting other platforms.
If your only purpose here is to gain financial rewards, go mine some crypto instead of mining the rewards pool here intended to reward creators and incentivize Steemit society. Your question indicates otherwise, despite interest in rewards.
Seek out content that aligns with your interests and comment cogently when you have insight to offer, and you will grow a community that is interested in what you have to say. Then your posts will be seen by your followers, rather than no one. Except for appearing in new, which is chaos, only your followers see your posts in their feed--unless you pay for botvotes, which doesn't get you any attention from me, cuz I'd rather wander aimlessly through new than be annoyed by the panderers in trending.
Build an audience through participating in the community of interest and you will post to that audience. You haven't done that yet. You are now, by commenting here.
Agreed. As a new user, I was able to spot this in a few weeks.
The fact that one user can throw a tantrum and downvotes my reputation from 40 to -5 proves that point. I am talking about #hgin if you haven't figured that out.
Unless these loopholes are fixed. There will be others like him and then the whole place will turn into a total spam fest.
@kabir88
I'd really love to witness that change @ats-david, but I guess if Steemit, Inc had any interest in fixing steemit.com they would've taken according actions. We're doing circles around the very same issues since months.
In that context I always remember those words from Ned during the 'blocktalk' two months ago (Source):
From that point on I stopped worrying about steemit.com because I realized that it's not a priority anymore. Yet I never fully understood their reasons. As you perfectly described, it's not a superficial issue but the consequence of a lacking governance.
The larger stakeholders would tell you now: Wait for Hivemind and SMTs. But then they don't tell you how long you need to wait...:-) Communities were announced in January 2017 and planned to be implemented in Q3/2017.
From my point of view, to abandon steemit.com and focussing on something completely new is as if someone wanted to fix a broken relationship by having a baby. How could an additional project built on the very same unstable ground, have a chance to succeed?
I've been powering down since November 2017 for the simple reason that I don't agree with how Steem is governed, and I never regret my decision. Since I only engage with my own community - both on the blockchain and on discord - I also sleep much better :-))
Now I perfectly understand your will to change something, I've been on the same track for months. But then there is a point of time when you realize that you're trying to fight against windmills...
Have you checked EOS.io already?
See you around 👊
@ats-david You havn't really explained what the disease is and why those forks created a problem.
You said that these protocol changes have stripped away spam protection, spam to me is also a symptom not the disease. Spam is the consequence of a system that penalize its users for moderating it which is what the steem blockchain does.
There needs to be some rewards for downvoting too, for example if a post has more negative weight than positive after 7 days then all the rewards on that post goes 100% to those who voted a negative and the author and those who upvoted get nothing. I don't know how hard and gameable it's going to be to build something like this but it is absolutely necessary for the community to police itself.
Regarding OP, the first question we have to ask is :
Is vote buying advertising or not? We have to come to consensus to what it actually is. If it's advertising then simple UI changes can solve most of it. On a side note I'm also surprised how all existing steem apps display the steem content in the same way which has proved to be one of the worst discoverability experience for users.
To answer the initial question, I see a lot of flaws in the vote buying model for it to be the way advertisers promote on steem in the future. To name a few: advertisement can be downvoted, buying limits ( model doesn't scale ). I could be wrong but in its current form I don't see it being used on a large scale by serious advertisers.
Of course. That was my entire point. The spam, the vote-selling, the shit content being “advertised,” the disengagement, the lack of accountability...this all became a bigger issue after the protocols were changed. They are all symptoms/consequences of last year’s hard forks.
I could explain in detail why/how the hard forks created these problems...which I’ve done many times over since last summer, including before they were implemented. And back then - just like now - nobody listened. But just for good measure, I suppose I’ll detail this again in a separate post. Too long to cover all of the various aspects of it here.
Are you really surprised by this though? Most of our “developers” here are hobbyists or first-timers developing in the social media space. They unfortunately don’t know the fundamentals of social media and user interests...and the users here aren’t typical SM users/content creators either, so both sides skew the metrics. Then we have the actual results of the voting/allocation and displays skewing it even further.
There isn’t even enough of a critical mass of users for real-world advertisers to even consider spending advertising dollars here. Anyone looking at the actual viewing and engagement stats - even for “trending” posts - would quickly look elsewhere to spend their money.
But even if we assume that advertising here actually gained visibility and returned some profit for businesses, it would be more beneficial to them to buy the STEEM once and use it repeatedly for self-voting or self-promotion, not rent space on the trending page for every post they make.
This is the mistake that current users continue to make as well. They pay for temporary advertisement and have nothing to show for it when the advertising period is over. So they’re stuck in this perpetual loop of paying for visibility over and over again when they could simply buy the STEEM outright and get perpetual use out of it.
But this happens in the real world all the time as well. People often rent for the wrong reasons and think that they’re coming out on top financially, but they truly believe that there’s no other way. They continue to do what keeps them poor...so they remain poor, even if it’s just relative to those who are “richer.”
And we have a ton of admittedly real-world poor people here on Steem/Steemit. Does anyone truly wonder why things are the way they are around here?
Wow, you are one of the few witnesses that actually understands a social network. You got my vote
The last point you made is spot on. In the long run users are much better off using those SBD's convert to SP and build their influence. Very few understand this but the steem blockchain rewards very well those who invest in it, compound interest is powerful but users have to be patient, it's not an overnight get rich quick thing.
Same goes for self voting, in the long run this strategy is detrimental. Because users isolate themselves by doing this and will end up being the only ones voting for their post instead of many that they could have supported through their upvotes.
I believe most of the issues on steem are self correcting, some of them also comes from the fact that the user base is still tiny. The moderation one however is critical IMHO. Posts on steem only have likes, they have no dislikes. This is problematic because there is no balance in the system.
I agree. I am very new to this but I want to say I am getting a creepy cult vibe from a lot of the comment sections because there is no hard way to challenge content you dislike. And when I look at what ends up on top I'm like WHAT??!! WHYY
I know what you mean, I'm getting the same vibe..comments on steem are monotonous, most of the discussions are boring and unexciting imo.
If users were incentivized to moderate content, then all the content that provides no value would get downvoted and the quality of interactions would increase greatly.
The constant drama on steem is a direct result of users lacking the tools to moderate this site. Vote buying abuse would be a no issue if downvoting was profitable.
Although... what would stop the power players from buying downvotes and bombing whomever they didnt like into oblivion
This is true, but it is also true that doing so is highly profitable, thus our allopathic medical establishment.
You failed to elucidate the underlying problem, IMHO, which is stake-weighting. Stake-weighting is also the source of meatspace problems, but Steemit makes it worse by directly linking financial holdings to societal power. At least in RL that link is obscured by rhetoric and the need to corrupt society covertly.
The virtues of society aren't even mostly financial. Simply making everything about money degrades society, and stake-weighting guarantees this. As a result, pimps and war profiteers are better rewarded in RL, just as on Steemit.
This is the root of the problem. All else is a symptom.
I love to see a discussion about this topic happening here.
A few weeks ago I made proposal how to fix current issues here on Steem - but didn't received that much feedback on it.
Maybe it's worth a try again now:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@steemhq/how-to-make-steem-great-again-the-exponential-author-reward-method
Here is a short summary:
Those changes described in this article would lead to a much fairer distribution of author rewards.
Promotion Bots will still have their place in this scenario but it would discurage people from putting large amounts of Steem(dollar) into those services in order to get on trending. And if they do, they better have REALLY GOOD content otherwise even a minnow downvote will have a huge impact on author rewards.
In order to get on trending good content is what matters again and not how much money is put into bots.
Sorry for self-voting this comment, but I still think this proposal would be a gamechanger for Steemit and will lead to huge growth on the platform and of course much more value for Steem on the market.
non-linear rewards
If only people had listened to this last spring...
Stinc wants things this way.
Its time to buy stinc stock, not steem, and vote the greedy f**ks out.
Are they public?
No. And if they were, their stock would be worthless. Ned would have been ousted as CEO about two years ago.
Who holds the keys for changing the code?
Well, STINC, of course. And all of their STINC-ophants.
Tow the line or risk being labeled and blacklisted. That’s always been the game around here. It isn’t exactly a secret.
Yeah, that is what i thought.
The witnesses are puppets, either vote with stinc or get voted out?
As for blacklists i know too well.
Folks that used to autovote me got talked to about how voting for me was holding them back.
Welcome back to high skool!
STINC doesn’t actually vote for witnesses anymore. But they did create and perpetuate the culture of cheerleading and shunning anyone who offers criticism, whether legitimate/pointed or not.
I’m sure this won’t exactly come as a shock to you, but...
Most of the witnesses are worthless. They don’t/can’t review code. They don’t run their own nodes. They don’t know how or why to set parameters. They just do what other witnesses do. So, when it comes time for big decisions and who to support, they just defer that responsibility to those that they perceive as “leaders” around here.
And we all know what that “leadership” is and how valuable/worthless it is.
XD
Here is my view, before the bots the trending page was the same 12 people. Now it is interesting to see who made it to the top.
It wasn't about content before, and it still isn't.
I love the idea that anyone can choose with their free will and Steem to get on the trending page.
Occasionally, something with low quality gets on the trending page, it can be flagged or blacklisted or accepted.
Get rid of the voting bots and you will get rid of a lot of investors and the trending page will be back to the same 12 people who were on it before.
If it is about the reward pool, focus on Haejin and Sweetsssj, that my point of view, you don't have to agree, but I wish you would consider it.
With the whale experiment limiting votes to 100mv the little people have a chance inthe math.
Nonlinear rewards discourage selfvoting.
Going back to hardfork 16 and applying lessons learned from this fiasco might make the next 800k new users stick around rather than tell their friends not to bother.
You are saying @sweetsssj is raping the pool? But she looks so innocuous. Her sweet smile doesn't look like the evil smile of a demmented rapist.
She looks so sad, even when she's smiling.
Particularly when she's smiling. =/
Serial rapist.
It's not just a job anymore, now you too can make it a profession.
When you are working for a living, the job can't be fun and giggles on a 24x7 basis.
I guess some of her pics catch her at a low spot. Not at the @sweetsssj high for the day.
Why don't you guys just implement a profit cap? That makes the most sense to me. These bots are supposed to be used for promotion purposes and not to make profit (Directly anyway). By setting a profit cap of 0% all the people abusing the system will simply stop using the services all on their own.
VOTED FOR VISIBILITY
I Strongly disagree with this solution.
If the main problem was people making too much money then your solution would make sense. Your solution would only increase the profits the Bid Bots are already making an encourage more people to make bots...
I think the main problem with Trending is "Non-trend" worthy articles pushed to the top by the same few people.
Either blacklist abusers or changing how trending works in general might be a better solution.
Agree with you my friend @digitokash.
What about separating the posts voted up by bots versus organically voted up. Ultimately, using a bid bot is advertising and one of the things a lot of people here are trying to get away from is advertising.
Further to that, what if the bid bots somehow rewarded the reader? Instead of money going to the bot to vote content artificially up, they money goes to users who choose to read the content.
One of the other blockchain social media platforms is doing that. sola or something like that or ong social. Can't remember which one.
Kind of like swagbucks pays people to watch advert videos by paying them a fraction of a cent for each video. Money goes to the viewer rather than the advertiser.
That won't stop users from buying votes from 5 different bid-bots which pushes them to the top trending spots.
Bids are publicly accessible right?
@oups
yes, they are
Well what incentive would they have to push the content to trending? They are clearly making money from the votes. If they decide that they still want to spend all that money getting to trending after a 0% profit cap they clearly think that they have a good/important article. If this was implemented there is NO way to abuse the bots, sure having a cap on 1 bot might not do much but this would need to be something every bot supported.
Let's say you want to promote your service, ico or whatever - then you don't really care about the ROI of this post but more about the publicity.
That's why ROI capping won't solve this problem.
Can you answer me what the difference is between buying or getting a large delegation and self voting post to trending or those who have little SBD and buy votes to get to trending. Shitpost are shitpost, why are delegated selfvoted shitpost not downvoted in the same manner as bought votes, they are 1 and the same!
Yeah, pretty much. Buying a vote one post at a time or buying delegation for a series of self-votes is the same. All shitposters have to buy votes to be “popular.” Most people can identify shit when they see it. Steemit is a little different because of the voting/allocation system, but the fundamentals of social media and popularity are generally the same.
Yes, it is social media and the theme of social media has always been shit floats. Does it surprise anyone that the same shit that is being paid to the top of other social media is moving here and doing the same thing now that the system is built that way?
What I can't wrap my head around is the few top 50 witnesses who promote steemit vote buying on youtube are top 50 here. It will be hard to change things when people are giving these select few power. I can think of one witness who has a bot that makes money off of bids to fund ads on youtube about how to come to steemit and use vote bot services. Why isn't that problem being corrected? He has even moved to top 20 now, so I guess the consensus is that these services are good or he is just buying proxy votes to move himself up the ranks with his bidbot.
At least you can go to his birthday party for delegating 5,000 SP.
XD Good lord, panderers are pathetic.
I replied it on your comment on the grumpycat's post, I hope it is somewhat worth seeing if you don't read it there.
The posts on the trending page upvoted by bidbots don't deserve to be there!
That's what the real problem is, most of the people think that the low-quality posts dominate the trending page and they don't deserve to be there.
Now, as the founder and developer of the smartsteem, I know that you can't check each and every post upvoted by your service, and I definitely know that you want to make steemit a better place and help people here.
So, instead of concentrating on all the users, how about you concentrate on the users bidding for big upvotes?
I mean nobody cares about if anyone gets 1$ upvote from any bid bot( small abusers can be handled easily by making guidelines and rules, blacklisting) but the ones who make it to the trending or hot page, everyone has got eyes on them, and it is your service that will be held responsible for taking them to the top of hot/trending level.
So if you check all the users who bid big( which would be about 1 or 2 in every 2.4 hours, that makes a maximum of 10-12 posts a day), you can considerably improve the quality of posts upvoted by your service that makes it to the trending page
You said it yourself that it took more than half a year for you to develop smartsteem, now I know that you don't want it to end in a way that people will remember it as a service that supported abusers. A service hated by a lot of people.
The whole thing depends upon how inclined you are to find a solution to improve the quality of posts upvoted by your service. That will help everyone, the investors, users. And more people will support the users in future if their post quality is good, that makes a long-term benefit for the user for the one-time investment, rendering your services more useful.
In the end, I believe that this is quite an opportunity for your service to make this a better place not just for the content creators, but for content absorbers too, as of now, most people create content, very few read it.
Why not? Afaik they are only allowing people after reviewing their profile and content (to look reasonable). Every post can be checked but who is smartsteem to decide what should I see or not? Is this why we should abandon greedy centralized social networks?
Possible solution is shut it off unfortunately. It might sounds harsh but it's for the greater good. It's just a matter of time that another network/coin will be available for us without this kind of services. When it happens, all those stake-holder just going to watch us leaving one by one. Than they try to out-bit their own contents.
👍
Truth is I never go to the trending page because of the bots. This also means I miss a lot of good content as I haven't found another way to find good content yet.
A good start would be a strike system for abuser accounts, after the 3rd strike you get put into the global blacklist that should eventually exist for all bots.
There's also need to be some community consensus on what abusing is, using bots on the 6th day of the post is obviously abuse and just reward pool raping but to what extend is using bots to promote your post also abuse? maybe a cap can be set in how much sbds/steem a user can give to bots for a certain post (i'm aware this can be hard to implement and there will always be non-compliant bots) and of course, community consensus should be reached for this cap, maybe a cap of 25/50 sbd/steem per post can be set or any other value really, just to stop seeing those post in trending with 500$+ of bot votes.
Just throwing my 1c into the convo after all i'm only a minnow lol.