[Pre-ANN] OCD-Bot
Preface
As many of you already know, I created the manual curation project called Operation Curation Delegation @ocd. Ever since I joined the platform I have been manually curating posts from all kinds of users, it started out by following newcomers and active authors of all sorts of content, nowadays I mostly follow those that post about stuff I am interested in.
After I received delegation to aid me in a more effective curation and the flow of new posts that started appearing with the increase in user-base I needed some help to spread the votes even wider and make sure as few authors as possible of quality and original content were left behind. I announced OCD over 5 months ago and today we are at 35 manual curators actively searching for content and around 150 total compilation posts of 5-10 unique authors per post nominated and supported and a bunch more that have been re-steemed.
Not only do we incentivize the curators to do a good job at finding these posts, but we also reward the authors with over 2 times the value the curators make. The purpose of the project is to keep user retention high, give authors that extra push to gain an audience and continue creating content without having to pay for votes.
The Problem
One of the problems today on the platform stands with services that provide you with voting support for a fee. This may not be a problem for everyone or something we may notice short term, but I believe it will cause more damage and affect the platforms health in the long run.
Its still a pretty fresh issue and many users are debating and discussing over it, but here are my main concerns with it.
Even though the short term benefits from buying votes might seem great (pay 1$ to receive 2$ in votes) many seem to not realize the consequences this has, such as:
- Users receiving bought votes indirectly take rewards from those that don't since we all share the same reward pool.
- Now there are middleman services that provides these offers and profit from every purchase and possible curation rewards.
- The bigger users enabling these services through delegations get paid for their votes directly instead of through the limited reward pool that offers curation rewards based on their stake.
- It makes the platform look "pay2win" which is frowned upon on most other places and according to me not what Steem is about.
The reasoning I've heard as to why these services are good:
- Smaller and new users would not make anything if they couldn't buy a boost for their posts.
- Smaller and new users wouldn't get any attention if they didn't buy votes to boost their posts to "Hot" or "Trending".
With these they seem to forget that:
On every platform, whether its Youtube, Facebook, Instagram or other similar ones users start out by doing "The Grind" as user @exyle has explained in his posts. This means that there should not be instant gratification to earn rewards or become "famous". Sure some users who already are famous might receive more attention when they first join the platform and bring along their follower-base, but those are an exception. For us regular users it should be about connecting with like-minded people, learning how to use your voting power efficiently to build a following and interact with others, etc.
Users should be able to start from scratch and use their activity and time spent on the site to start seeing rewards build up for them, not have to pay to be able to take a shortcut. It creates a sense of unfairness and not just through the distribution of rewards but also attention.
There is a way on Steemit to be able to pay for attention and that is the "Promoted" tab, which means that each time you spend some Steem Dollars to promote a post it will end up in that section and the Steem Dollars will be sent to an account that effectively burn them making it so that everyone on the platform gains from it depending on their stake, not just a few middlemen that offer the paying for votes services and those enabling them with delegations. Sure that system may not be very popular and lacking of views and attention, but we can't forget that the platform is still at its early stages and that part has not been worked on very much. A few users from the @busy team have added an extra incentive to the Promoted tab which gives you a vote if you use $D to promote your post.
There are many other consequences with these, such as users buying votes just to raise reputation for future malicious activity. Decrease in manual curation of these posts and letting authors who might not be writing that great content be able to ROI faster than the platform usually allows through the usual methods while those enabling this still profit the most. I don't want to get too deep into that as that's not what this post is about, its about trying to find other solutions to it, or at the very least something that can compete versus these services - if not through ROI then hopefully through good faith and wanting the platform and value of Steem to rise in the future.
As I said these services are pretty new to the platform, thus what I have been discussing may not be 100% accurate and represents more my thoughts and fears of how it can be abused and the damage it can do.
Our Solution
Like a few other curation projects out there, the oldest and biggest being @curie. We strive on curating new authors who write quality content and are underappreciated in general either due to being early or just because of the masses of people posting making them hard to spot. We currently have between 800-1000 unique authors we have picked up so far, although our efforts to give them a boost in rewards and attention may often have been for a single time only, we've always had it in mind to do it in a more continual fashion. This is why we are now sharing with you our ideas of the OCD-bot and what it entails.
I've been lucky to be in contact with a great developer called @pharesim who is one of the early Steemians and has put great efforts into distributing stake widely by following many manual curators with his own account. He will be taking care of the coding of the bot and making sure it flows the way it should.
How the bot will operate
We will be accepting delegations to the bot account from Steemians interested in helping out with this project and receiving all of the curation rewards back depending on the amount they have delegated.
We will start by automating 60% of the daily voting power to curate on all previous authors nominated by OCD, limiting support to a few posts per week depending on how much voting power is being used.
We will be scanning all outgoing votes and blacklist abusers from the bot support.
20% will go into the new authors we nominate daily and thus will be voted on manually. This 20% will possibly have increased curation rewards as the bot will front-run my votes if the target $20 reward per post is not met.
We will also use the bot to curate on the daily OCD compilation posts which the rewards are shared among the curators, these votes will also be front-running mine thus providing more curation rewards to the delegatees.
Possible vote scaling on a reversed busy.org format, where authors will receive bigger votes depending on the lack of followers with high SP they have.
This pre-announcement serves also as a way to discuss the effectiveness of the bot and if our community has some improvement ideas. We would love to hear them out so please feel free to voice your concerns, questions and further discussions in the comments.
As many other blockchain enthusiasts we at OCD strive for a fair distribution toward our user-base and not having the need for middlemen earning on our efforts.
Thank you for reading, we are looking forward to start and improve along the way.
This is an interesting one to me, I still consider myself pretty mew to this platform in the sense of know what works what doesn't etc. I pretty much tried out all the bots to see what they do and how it affects followers and upvotes.
In my ideal version of steemit there would be no bots and no selling votes, I think that is just a version that is not as easy to "gamify". When I first got here I knew bots were already in place and the ability to buy votes was already established, that's the way it was and it was not "coded" out. As soon as someone tells me there are bots and the ability to buy votes I can instantly create a million scenarios of how that is going to be used so I never had some "ideal" or wanted it to be different than it was. I just looked at it as ok I know what I'm getting into so I have to deal with it or not bother.
The view of buying votes maing it appear pay to play is a valid point but on the same hand it sort of already is pay to play, sink money in and buy steempower and upvote for more. People already complain about that a lot simply from that angle. Which again to me was, hey that's jut way system was set up so I knew what I was getting into and the same reason I bought thousands of steem.
The problem I see is how does anyone actually stop the vote buying ? if you don't stop it then its going to be used. In my mind its like going to war and one country has nukes but the other country says ok nukes are destructive to the environment so we wont use them. You know who is going to win. Unless the actual developers make it an issue and try to stamp it out I almost view it as a loosing battle. I am not one to full on pay for tons of votes and try to "abuse" it but I do try new things out like hitting trending page just recently to see how it effects me. As of Now it just seems to have gotten me a lot of spam comments and some grief for being a "vote buyer" but I still view it as just trying things out.
Your plan sounds like almost a view of patreon but spread out which In some ways I think is a good idea to help boost lots of newer accounts with quality content. I do worry it could be seen as just another bot and another way to "game" the system but I guess I don't ponder it too deeply because I think in how I see steemit even something like that wouldn't be allowed because I could imagine quickly other people setting up the same sort of system but without your good intentions.
Not sure where that leaves me on the topic but it is something I keep an eye on to see how all this develops because I think your warning is a valid one and a possible outcome. The one thing I know is to be "successful" here you need actual real people who enjoy your work and are willing to upvote on a consistent basis and that's my long term goal. How I go about trying to achieve that may very as I try things but my goal remains the same.
Good luck with the project and I will donate some sp to the cause to try it out and help some quality work.
Hi again! I have posted the proposal of which is inspired in part, to this post and discussion. I have since posted a proposal for the rectification of this problem as I have mentioned in the earlier comment here.
You are mentioned in the post. Have a read!
Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function
"it sort of already is pay to play, sink money in and buy steempower and upvote for more"
"if you don't stop it then its going to be used. In my mind its like going to war and one country has nukes but the other country says ok nukes are destructive to the environment so we wont use them. You know who is going to win."
Thank you for pointing out what should be blindingly obvious.
Code is law. Fix the code or give it up. Write the pull request or find someone who can.
Extremely relevant:
https://steemit.com/steem/@lexiconical/code-is-law-only-when-i-want-otherwise-it-s-abuse-the-shaming-syndicate-of-steemit-our-own-brand-of-sjws-and-social-repression
PS - Can we LOL at this part together:
"There is a way on Steemit to be able to pay for attention and that is the "Promoted" tab"
As much the 'Promoted' tab exists, I think it is pretty clear that it does not work for everybody.
I made a post in regards to how Upvoting Services are affect the Steemit ecosystem and a proposal for the solution of which is to revamp the 'Promoted' tab.
Have a look maybe?
Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function
If i had read your comment before posting mine i would have saved ten minutes of my life. Agree with you completely.
I read yours and thought you phrased it better than me :) nice work as well in your blog I gave you a follow.
I think we have expressed the same concerns just in different words. So i thought would have saved me the trouble of writing just by endorsing you. Following you as well. Cheers!
That is a false statement, and an idiotic (in my opinion) statement. I have not bought any votes, I have only called on o-works a couple of times, (my wife wanted to know how it worked) on my own work. I have for other people's work though. I have muted a lot of bots, mostly resteem bots, they seemed to be everywhere last month. I have also muted several minnow support type bots.
If someone wants money or a vote from me to provide a service that promises even a 2% ROI, then it is an unsustainable system. Unless of course the person making the offer is doing so out of a philanthropic heart.
I just made it 100 days on steemit, and the only help I have had along the way, has been the votes of other steemians. I now have 157SP, and my vote is worth just slightly more than a penny.
To conclude the number 1. reason for needing a paid for vote scheme is just that a scheme. Of course that is just my opinion, I am sure some people that have been here for more than 9 months might disagree with me, and some would agree. That is life.
"I just made it 100 days on steemit, and the only help I have had along the way, has been the votes of other steemians. I now have 157SP, and my vote is worth just slightly more than a penny."
In other words, you've made next to no money or reputation. In over 3 months, at current price, you are averaging about $1.40 a day. Perhaps if you lived in Mongolia, this would qualify as an OK minimum wage job.
Gee, it sounds like this applies to you:
"Smaller and new users would not make anything if they couldn't buy a boost for their posts."
If this was a job for me, or a second form of needed income it would be a very poor choice I agree. But the fact is it is not a second income for me, and as you have pointed out if it was it would be a poor choice. I'm just here for the fun of it, not to make money. The money part is a nice bonus though. Unlike you I do not have 25,000 dollars laying around to "invest" in stemmit. So I pretty much just use the social side of steemit. Congratulations to you and all the success you have had since June of this year.
we paid much more for our steem. both lexi and I have actually lost a lot.
it was more like 65000 =( and 110000 =(
With the advent of SMT's coming, and the news of a big investor, maybe you will begin to see a return on your investment. There is always the possibility of steem going up.
yes i am hoping. price hasnt moved yet from that 20 million story.
With all the holidays and things slowing down, maybe mid Jan. or Feb. I really don't know or follow the stock markets or crypto very much. Just guessing like everyone else things slow to a hectic pace about now till Jan 10th or so. And really no loss until you start to withdraw.
@nikez452 have you heard of APPICS. HODL your steem and expect to get a big return in July as that is when the price of steem will go up again.
Nice, I'm just approaching 2 months, probably like 45 days right now. I'd say this approach to the platform is the most steady. Steem has been volatile and the platform is evolving so it feels better to me to go slowly and just produce the content that I like along the way.
I do think that it's interesting to track account SP and Reputation against each other. I think there is probably some correlation depending how a user approaches publishing in terms of schedule and originality (thats saying nothing for depth or frequency which I think are also factors to a degree).
At any rate, it's good to see other folks that joined around the months that I did and learn about the perspective to Steemit. Thanks for putting your thoughts up here.
hmm
Solid points above. I'd add that anything established users can do to help newer users like myself to progress into an engaging community here on the platform is going to help retention and also probably incentivize those users organically. That's at least how I've approached it.
I'd say that I have been lucky to advance in terms of reputation fairly quickly via photography and travel posts. However, getting deeper into the media and technology topics here makes me feel like I should develop more depth for them so they take significantly more effort.
With that said, I've used a paid vote service once and didn't really find it to be a great advantage. There are probably others or better producers but I'm not sure I want to have those accounts associated with mine.
Still learning here. Thanks for sharing these ideas though. It's really useful for me to get perspective from users that have been watching the platform and token ecosystem develop for a while.
It will be absolutely destructive if not nipped in the butt, or at the very least diluted in impact, soon enough. Steem(it) as an experiment may succeed or fail over how we manage to deal with bots and their economy.
Bots are good. Pay2Win is e(xc)lusive.
I 100% agree!
Bots like minnowbooster could eventually turn into the cancer of steem(it).
However, bots like originalworks and cheetah are essential for steem(it) to grow.
You know my thoughts on the current situation so when the time comes to take delegations, you get mine.
Hopefully some of the large accounts see platform and future potential value of this and get behind it also.
An interesting concept, I was already hoping for something like "send me SBD and I will upvote you"-bot, as they are urgently required on Steemit[/joke]
In my perspective, OCD is popular and successful curation group, even though I can imagine it's not easy to run it in a perfect (or even good) manner to suit what you would except from it.
The great thing for good creators is that they do not need to understand OCD or OCD bot, if they will only reach the attention they deserve.
I fully agree with and support you.
I delegated steempower for curation on Korean community.
We need more curator in Kr community
I wish your concern on Kr community.
We will be adding more Asian language curators to OCD soon and hopefully be able to support them all in the future through the bot that is being worked on. I appreciate your support and manual curating on the platform!
Will the bot be running from the @ocd account? (Using @ocd SP and VP) and then delegations would go there? Or would it be a separate account that would be added for this purpose.
I love the idea of having a running list of people who have been nominated getting a bit more consistent votes. It also gives an opportunity for people to trail quality content and guaranteed curation rewards by front running you
It will be on a different account and the daily new authors we find added to the list it supports.
Great points there, there were many things that I've learnt especially from what you've pointed out especially the use of paid services and promoted tabs. I have heard of @exyle speak of the grind before and it is very true.
What you are doing makes a difference. I remember seeing @curie and your vote on my second post. It's very encouraging and keeps me writing. Do let me know if there's help you need. Until then, keep rocking on!
That's a brilliant way to support people who are constantly churning out quality content! Nice way to encourage those who have been nominated before but have not had any success after the nomination.