SteemWorld ~ Some thoughts on the CSI...
CSI - An indicator with different meanings for different people. You can call it as you desire and it could be a shortcut for "Community Support Index/Indicator". Some people think that communities don't exist and I must say that the meaning of the word "community" can vary very much for each individual in the world. A community for me is a group of people that my focus is attended to more than to other groups which I may even not know exist.
While I was working on the calculation for the CSI I came to the conclusion that it also could be called "Curators Support Index". However we want to call it, important for me is that it is being seen as a number that helps us determining how much a user is giving back to the people around him. When I use 10% of my weekly available voting power (VP) for upvoting myself it is a fact that I can give exactly 90% of my VP for supporting other accounts. With that in mind it should make sense that a user with a self vote rate of 0% will in most cases have a higher (more positive) CSI than a user with 10%.
But...
The question for me currently is if a self vote of a user with one million SP should be seen as less negative than one from a user with 1000 SP or if they should be seen as equally "bad". Fact is that huge stake holders are a significant reason for having enough STEEM bound to the system that is feeding all of us and without them the lights could go off faster than we may have thought. If that is true the next question for me is: "Where is the line?"
How much self voting should be considered as "okay" and how much of it should have a negative impact on the CSI?
Many minnows argue that they would not earn enough without their tiny self votes and therefore they have a right to have a much higher self vote rate. What I have seen since my beginning on Steemit is that it is more important to write good comments and to support other people because it increases the chance drastically for getting back great support.
Why the CSI just indicates what already is
When I read a good article on Steemit and I know that the person who wrote it upvotes himself more than the people around him I don't give any or just a small upvote regardless of how good the content is and I know that many people act in the same way. That means a smaller self vote rate leads to more/stronger upvotes from his audience and may even lead to higher rewards. We should keep that in mind and I hope with these words I can bring some light to the unknown darkness in which the CSI currently resides. It is meant to be a help for us and nothing else.
Some words on the negative impact of always upvoting the same people
Of course there are ways one can have a self vote rate of 0% and still upvote mainly oneself by creating multiple accounts and upvote them instead. Therefore the CSI calculation looks for outgoing votes to the same accounts which frequently occur. Most of us have some favorited authors and of course that is fully okay but here the same question remains: "Where is the line?"
Some people said that their "community" just consists of 3 people and therefore they can only upvote the content of these accounts. I don't believe that one can find only 3 people on Steemit who share the same thoughts or are creating things which are interesting for them. But if that should be true they have a good explanation for their low CSI and should not see it as a badly calculated result. There are curators on Steemit who support hundreds of people on a daily basis and as one might guess their CSI should of course show a higher value.
It is only an indicator
The CSI is an indicator that can indicate strange voting behaviour but of course it can not tell the whole story of a person. Nobody should undertake any negative action like downvoting someones content only by taking a look at the CSI. For such a purpose it is not there. It can help curators to decide if they should do a small or a strong upvote for example.
You may have noticed that the CSI on SteemWorld is "currently NA" and the reasons for this are some important questions for which I don't have an answer yet. Until I am not fully satisfied it will remain not available. Maybe the red and green colors have irritated some people and I should just show the value without doing any further rating so the people can decide for themself if it is good or not. I will think about it and I hope we can find a solution that will at least be acceptable for most of us.
In the meantime...
I have added a new feature on SteemWorld that shows us a list of our top 250 upvoted accounts of the past week:
Thank you for taking the time to think about all this! Please leave me a comment with your thoughts ;)
I will leave my thoughts here, as many people are referring back to articles explaining CSI amidst the new curation guidelines. I, myself, read this one on o1eh's recommendation to a user. They will definitely look up this one.
My take:
Use vs. Abuse
You made this indicator available on steemworld.org, initially marked as N/A, after thoroughly understanding the dynamics of how this marker works. This is undoubtedly a positive development. You have earned people's trust through your long-term contributions to this platform and ecosystem, so they will take your word for it. In my opinion, if it is not abused, an index of 5 is a pretty good indicator of give and take.
Btw, thank you for the detailed voting top list! 👍
Some more ideas:
Thanks for your great ideas and your upvotes!
I thought the same yesterday ;) The line showing the reputation would really be a nice place for that button. I'm still thinking about a short label for it. "Details..." as in the line of the CSI would fit but may be a bit confusing. "Incoming Votes..." is too long because I want the buttons to have the same width...
TOP supporters could be a nice name for it.
I've added a new button "Supporters..." ;) Maybe I'm going to rename it later.
The percentage is currently only calculated by the use of the vote weight not the amount. I think that should be configurable. In the coming days there will be a new button in the voting details dialog to switch between amount/weight.
That was fast! 👍
H as opposed to an indicator that is derived from data sets. Because then, it already becomes subjective since a decision has to be made which kind of data gets included and how it is weighed.
Yes, after thinking about the effects the color could have especially on minnows I tend to go in the same direction and remove the color completely.
Furthermore I have planned to add some more details (number of accounts voted, number of votes in general and maybe some more about account activity) as you've stated. I also want to add a possibility to be able to display the data for 30 days or so.
I still like the idea of having a number that can represent all the data in a more "compressed" form :) But maybe it should be placed elsewhere so that the people don't concentrate too much on their index. Of course there are more important things in life... ^^
You're such a busy man - and we all appreciate what you are doing here. I have perhaps a silly question - but am I missing the bandwidth information? I keep a tab open with steemd just to see that one piece of information.
I began studying your first post which outlines information still very useful. It got me appreciating that I will always be scratching the surface of the power of this great tool, while lacking the full comprehension of it. If I may make a small suggestion - that you add a link back to the earlier posts so whenever we resteem your update post, that our followers can find everything easily.
Thanks for your kind feedback!
That one got me. Some details about the bandwidth can be seen in the "Account Details" at the bottom but it seems not to show all the relevant data and it's being displayed without any progress bar. I will try to add the bandwidth information. May take some days until I find time for it.
You're right, I really should add some links to the earlier posts.
Thanks for your very helpful suggestions!
That's worth a 100% upvote ;)
This is good stuff you are explaining here.
Most upvotes were made in effort to get a vote back.
I can see some steemians were kinda struggling to get upvote and now of all sudden they are making thousands. They are getting upvotes even after three days. This is consistency.
I consider self vote a way to stay afloat on steemit.
If you are earning good reward for whatever you post, you do not have time to selfvote.
I am completely agree, we all need to be fair and just.
We all need each other.
Keep on steemin'
I use the site daily and really appreciate the work you put into it.
I'm curious as to if you are going to add some variables there. I'd like to be able to see the # of times someone voted vs weight.
I've got several I've added to mack-bot that have contacted me claiming not to know "who" owns the other 50 to 1000 accounts that follow around and upvote only their posts or a small group of posts exclusively.
I find the idea of the CSI helpful. Maybe having just a number without a color? I personally don't rely on numbers by themselves. They are an indicator as you said but I look at the accounts before making decisions.
Thank you @patrice!
I will add the number of votes there in an extra column next to the weight. Maybe it would also make sense to have a "by number of votes" option in the second select box.
Yes, I think as an indicator the CSI can help to detect strange accounts faster. But as I've seen it's difficult to make a judgement based alone on that number and therefore I will remove the color so that the value will always be displayed in black. I hope that I will find time in the coming days to finish the algorithm.
Maybe we will need an extra tab for the voting activity in future because there is not really much space for more details available. Some new ideas came to my mind recently regarding voted tags and a few other interesting things that could be shown there but that will come later.
If you should need any special feature for your investigations in the tool, let me know! I really like what you are doing here ;)
I LOVES me Some PATRICE!!!
Thanks for the new account, I did not see any new posts to upvote when you first made it for me :* :D :)
Love You PATRICE! :D
Resteemed
Wenn man bei der Steemworld URL mit @username und hinten dran einen Schrägstrich macht, dann funktioniert die Seite nicht richtig, also z.v. so
Nur, wenn der Strich am Ende weg ist kommt man auf die Seite. Ist nichts schlimmes oder behebenswerts. Hab das aber noch nie so erlebt. Woran liegt denn das?
Danke dir für den Hinweis! Das liegt an der .htaccess und der Art wie ich den Usernamen darüber auslese. Aktuell mache ich das mit:
Werde ich bei Gelegenheit mal prüfen. Passieren kann da nichts und selbst wenn jemand dadurch Zugriff auf Root-Verzeichnisse bekommen könnte, würde das nicht viel bringen, da ich die Original-Skripte nicht dort liegen habe.
Oh das ist ein echtes Problem? Gibts dein Projekt inzwischen auch bei @utopian-io? Vielleicht hätt ichs dort veröffentlichen sollen.Da gibts bessere upvotes und nicht nur so Popel-64-Cent Dinger..pffft;-)
Die Verzeichnisse sind geschützt, aber schön ist sowas natürlich trotzdem nicht. Ich wollte dir ja sowieso noch einen geben letztens. Wieso hast du eigentlich so gut wie deine gesamte Power an Booster verliehen? Hättest du das nicht gemacht, hättest du sicher ein paar mehr 100%ige bekommen... ^^
Ich wollte ausprobieren wie viel das Delegieren bringt. @boomerang zahlt sogar recht gut, @minnowbooster nicht so sehr, weshalb ich letztere Delgation schon wieder aufgelöst habe - zumal ich auch Bandbreitenprobleme bekommen habe. Ab Übermorgen oder so kann ich wieder in den vollen Upvote Sack greifen^^
A propos: Ich hab noch ein Verbesserungsvorschlag und zwar bei den Artikelstats bei Steemworld fände ich es besser wenn anstatt der Payout Time das Alter des Artikels angegeben wäre in T,h,m. Die ganzen upvote Bots haben nämlich mittlerweile eine zeitliche Grenze eingebaut und ich finde es nervig das immer zurückzurechnen, nur um dann doch kein upvote zu bekommen, weil der Bot zu spät abstimmen wollte.
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Jetzt wo ich grad so schön dabei bin, kannst du vielleicht meinen Volvo Post resteemen? Ich find den viel zu gut, als dass er bei 10 Ansichten versauern sollte. Du hast doch so viele Follower und so. thc;-)
Ja, das mit dem Created Date wollte ich sowieso nochmal überarbeiten. Da genug Platz für beides ist, werde ich das dann wahrscheinlich nebeneinander anzeigen (d,h,m | date).
Wenn ich deinen Post resteemen würde, würde ich mindestens 3 Follower verlieren... ^^ So gut ist der auch nicht und sowieso hast du doch mehr Follower als ich ;) Die meisten Leute auf Steemit sind mit Mainstream-Geschichten übrigens nicht so wirklich zu beeindrucken (viele sind ja von anderen Plattformen geflüchtet, um diese Scheiße nicht mehr sehen zu müssen).
Sehr gut. Und danach bitte das mit den mentions. Du bist echt richtig fleissig;-)
Zum Volvopost: heh der ist nicht Mainstream, den hab ich mir selbst ausgedacht! Vielleicht ist es ja besser wenn du die 3 verlierst, so als ne Art Evolutionsflaschenhals..^^
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Für welche Darstellungsgröße hast du die Seite eigentlich optimiert? Wenn du schreibst, dass genug Platz ist, heisst das, dass auch bei Smartphones genug Platz ist oder müssen die sich dann (bzw. sowieso) rumzoomen?
Another great improvement of your impressive tool, thank you for that. I know Christmas is over but I would like to have, in addition to the ever changing $ value behind the posts and/ or the votes I give, some fixed value like a percentage of my SP, which does not change with ever changing Steem/SBD or Steem and SBD to US$ or BTC or whatever the reason for those fluctuating $ amounts in your tool is.
Because with each upvote at 100% I give a certain percentage of my SP which I guess does not change, just the value in $ changes.
If you ever get bored and have programmed everything you could think about into your tool, maybe that would be a feature to implement. Cheers!
I like the idea of the CSI, and I also think that the red and green coloring implies negative/positive connotation, so people will naturally take it as good/bad.
As an analyst, I would think metrics like #/% of self-votes & #/% of same-user votes, and also the same by vote value rather than counts would all be very useful stats. I really like the pie chart too, because graphics are always good to break up all of the various stats. Having more graphs/charts would also be useful, like daily/weekly/monthly votes metrics and whatnot plotted on a line graph. I'm a data junkie ;)
I think it all depends on the time frame you base it on.
When I intend to use the Steemit Blockchain for an unknown amount of time, my behavior will change within the events arising. I will first try something out and then try out something else. I will listen to opinions as well as to provided analysis.
What makes the Steemit universe for me so interesting is the vast variety of provided content and also how people publish to deal with it. My decisions can be made by my mood within a second and also by the thorough consideration which show my basic tendencies but I would say, do not provide an overall picture of me. The overall picture might be taken place when
a.) I die (virtually or in real life)
b.) less drastically: I decide to leave the platform and never come back
Success and flaws can be measured from my point of view in retrospective and also it lays in the eye of every beholder what is defined as success, bad behavior and enhancing or harming the platform (other participants).
My success or my popularity and unpopularity is visible to me in the form of votes, revenues and the direct contact with humans in the form of communication through the comment section and the attached chat platforms.
Altogether, I do not care so much for self-voting and do it only when I think a comment of mine should be placed for some good reason. Otherwise, I forget about it or find it myself a bit distasteful when I notice it in others to an overly stretched degree. But this could be seen as stupid, also. Well, that is not my concern.
I think of a funny function, like "deaths" of users - you only would know, if someone announces it, right? As one cannot announce his or her own death, this must be made by another befriended user. As long it is only a virtual death, a visible measurement of this "dead user" might be of interest. Because, there a time frame is "finished". .... I really don't know. It is just a thought which may be of use or not. As you never know a deceased can also resurrect and come back. :)