Alternative Trending/Hot Pages, API and More Information

in #steemdev7 years ago



New Content Discovery Pages

Sincerely Trending - stake-weighted resteems within the past 3 days
Sincerely Hot - stake-weighted resteems within the past 12 hours

Developer API

I am providing an API for developers to use to incorporate these new content indexes into their own applications, and @stoodkev is hoping to add something to SteemPlus soon. The methods are as follow:
https://steem-sincerity.dapptools.info/s/api/stake-weighted-resteem-trending
https://steem-sincerity.dapptools.info/s/api/stake-weighted-resteem-hot


Background

At this point in the evolution of the Steem platform, the desire for a return on their investment has now led the majority of the large Steem stakeholders to delegate most of their Steem Power to bidbots or other projects that also generate a good financial return. I think increasing the curation percentage would probably help to bring some people back to doing what has become a nearly thankless task, but this change has been discussed at length without witness consensus so far.

It seems to me that there is still some good curation happening on the Steem platform, but 'trending' is not really getting these signals anymore. Unlike voting (versus delegating), resteeming has no associated opportunity cost. That is, there is nothing else that people could do with their 'resteeming power' except to resteem content they would like to promote.

With this in mind I have created new alternative 'trending' and 'hot' pages which use stake-weighted resteems to determine the order of content. If this was a naive approach which allowed people to resteem to prominance as much as they wanted, the results would not be good. Instead though, the total influence of any active stakeholder is proportional to their stake. If they wish to resteem 100 posts in a day, their influence is shared equally between those, and each post will only receive a small boost. If they choose to resteem only one post, that gets the full boost that their SP provides.

This approach has another benefit. Whereas voting often goes unnoticed (except by the recipient), many are judging those they follow by their resteems, which probably fosters more responsibility and consideration.

One final decision I needed to make was whether the stake-weighted resteems should include delegated SP or not. In the light of experience, it seems that although delegation has many great uses, such as in Utopian, where it furthers the development of the Steem ecosystem, it has no place in a 'Steem first' content curation process. Since resteem bots are not compatible with this view, they won't be allowed to affect it.

Many of those with a financial interest in the future of the platform might be sacrificing it for short-term ROI, but are still curating like they care - if we know where to look!

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