The Curation Conundrum
Introduction
I don't normally like posting about internal Steemit matters but I think this is an important issue that has been a problem since the very start.
One of the central problems with Steemit is that of curation.
It seems everyone wants to write articles and create posts but few people want to read them, let alone actively curate content.
We have a fundamental economic problem here - there are too many producers and not enough "real" consumers.
Further there is an even greater scarcity of one of the most important types of consumers i.e. the active curator.
In my opinion, high quality active curation is of equal importance to good quality writing and content production.
They are two sides of the same equation.
We need to have good content rise to the top - or at the very least to do better than spam.
Everyone is time starved and if we want to attract more readers to consume the content they need to be able to find it.
Sadly it seems there is little incentive to carry out actual active curation.
Why is this?
1)Real curation requires a lot of work and effort.
You have to search through huge amounts of crap and spam to find the odd gem. This can take hours of work and it is not guaranteed you will find anything truly valuable. You are searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack and it requires a lot of effort. So people stop bothering, they vote either randomly or tactically, neither of which involves what most people would consider true curation. I think we have all fallen into this trap and to be honest it is to be expected as the current economic system encourages it.
2)The reverse auction system actually rewards the using of bots.
This has been discussed many times before. The reverse auction was created to discourage bots claiming the majority of rewards by immediately voting on new posts. However it may actually disincentivise people voting manually. The cognitive load of calculating whether you should vote or not based on the timing is an extra hassle for people.
3)There is little reward in curation unless you have a massive stake.
Unless you have a whale level account there is little to be gained from actual curation. Further if you are a whale it doesn't really matter if you curate or not since you vote will likely be large enough to create a bandwagon/swarming effect on a particular post. If you vote for anything often enough others will notice and you will become a "good curator".
This is not because you chose good content, but because others will follow after your vote in an attempt to gain curation rewards.
One solution might be if you are a good curator you should buy a massive stake and that way you will profit from it.
This would work if all good curators had the money to put behind and back their curation efforts but just because you have a lot of money does not make you a good curator.
The Albert Einstein of curators may be out there but without the financial means to be a whale there would be little incentive for him to use his talents on Steemit.
Further as I mention above if you are a whale you can make any content become successful due to the bandwagon effect, so why would you bother to work to find good content when you don't have to?
In fact you may still be better of spending your time writing posts rather than actively curating. So we go back to the lack of incentive to curate versus writing.
4)Only 25% of post rewards go to curators.
I'm not sure how much actual difference it would make if there was a 50:50 split, but the current breakdown only serves to emphasise the greater value that is placed on writers vs. curators.
Whether the actual financial difference is big or small, the psychological signal it sends out is that curators are not as important as content creators.
There are also likely other issues that disincentivise manual curation that I haven't even thought of.
What is the solution?
I would love to say I have some kind of ingenious solution to these issues but I don't.
If it were that simple to find an answer it would already have been implemented. That is not to say that we should not try.
Here are some possibilities for consideration:
Switch back to 50:50 rewards for curation.
Remove the self-vote option for posts - or remove curation rewards from self-upvotes. Yes people could game it but why incentivise them to do it?
Look at extra rewards for top curators. The question is where would they come from - perhaps they could come from the extra 20th witness that was created by the removal of mining. I think it is worth looking at. Curation could be considered mining good content.
These are just a few things to think about and likely have multiple problems that will need to be refined. Even then they may not work.
As has been emphasised many times before Steemit is still a work in progress and we need to test out and iterate things to find out what works best.
Avoiding change paralysis and the problem fixation trap
It should also be considered that there may not be "perfect" answers that solve the situation, but there may be adjustments that make the situation better overall if they are put into practice.
Real life and human interactions are not fixed, ordered systems like computer code and I think it is often a mistake to treat them as if they were.
This is particularly so on a platform like Steemit/Steem.
One of the big problems I have seen whenever a platform change is suggested is that some people will negate it by highlighting problems.
This makes sense if it refines the solution, however all too often a particular solution is shot down and further discussion closed.
Either the solution is "perfect" or it cannot be used.
I would call this "problem fixation" and it can lead to a form of paralysis because in many cases it does not take account of the magnitude of the solution in comparison to the actual initial problem. People become so fixated on the negatives that they lose sight of the potential gain.
Just because a potential solution could be gamed by bad actors does not mean it will be. Further even if it is one must consider how many people will do it and the real world impact.
A small negative effect is acceptable if the overall gain is larger in magnitude.
For example it would not make sense to take a medication with dangerous side effects to cure a minor illness.
On the other hand if you had terminal cancer you would probably tolerate much more serious side effects because the potential gain (saving your life) would outweigh those negatives.
The real world is often like this. It is a balance of risks and rewards with few "clean" solutions that solve everything.
If we just abandoned every potential solution the moment we found a problem with it we would never make any progress.
Anyway, these are my thoughts on the situation. I think with we should keep exploring ways to improve the platform and discussion is an important part of that.
Thank you for reading
As an active curator that most of the time strives to vote on content I know will probably not see many votes after mine due to it being new users, etc. I have thought about this for a long time which changes would help out to incentivize curation more for all accounts involved.
Even though curation has a much bigger inventive here than say on other platforms such as Reddit it can still be finetuned more and I hope it will become better over time and experiments.
The curation penalty for voting early should be changed somewhat. I know this was put in place because of bots voting on the same second a post was released by authors they knew will gather a lot of votes but this was also done at a time when people were already using bots for their 40 daily votes. Now with only 10 daily votes and a bigger inventive to vote manually this could incentivize curators to check through the 'new' section more often in hopes of finding the gems that people don't already have on automatic bots.
Combined with that I think we need to rething the curve of rewarding curation where the first voters receive a much bigger piece of the pie than those voting last. I've noticed that often even if you are the last to vote you still make a decent amount of curation rewards if your stake is big, this would at the same time discourage curators from voting on friends and the popular authors if they notice it has already garnered big amount of rewards and they might consider voting on something newer or with less rewards instead.
At the same time, increasing the curation reward pool and decreasing the post reward one would activate more authors to start voting.
There are a lot of things that can still be improved on and experimented with and I'm sure we will be able to find a better balance over time.
I also noticed the lack of mention of delegation in your post, having read a post of @benjojo recently I have to admit that its like a superpower and in the right hands it will make curation even more effective on the platform.
I am for instance delegating my own SP further to the curators of @ocd and we are looking to growing over time in amount of curators and delegation with the platform and its userbase to make sure that less and less quality and new authors get overlooked.
Steem has a lot of incentives and even though not all of them are being used to their max extent yet I believe it will get better and better over time.
Sorry for possible typos, wrote this on my phone with a Swedish keyboard. :P
I agree with most of the points you made. In my opinion the real problem is with the content discovery. Since whales already have enough followers their posts generally gets upvoted if the content is good. The problem is with the content discovery for the new authors. Not many people are ready to spend time reading the posts of their friends and followers. They are constantly looking at the posts by whales so that they can upvote them in the hope of getting some curation rewards.
So we will need to turn the tables around give more rewards for the discovery of content by authors whose average earnings are low. Since whales with large number of followers already get enough votes and rewards, the curation rewards for discovering their content should be reduce. Adding curation rewards for resteeming can solve this problem to a certain extent. Remember that an upvote doesn't increase the visibility of a post, it only increases the rewards for the author of the post but it doesn't help in making the post reachable to others. If possible we should identify who are having a network effect in making content more popular and reward them accordingly. That will create a level playing field. Irrespective of whether you are a whale or a minnows you will be in the lookout for the good content and resteem them to make sure that it gets the visibility it deserves. Wildspark is already doing this successfully and may be steemit can learn from it.
If we don't address this problem Steemit will turn out to be like the Ghost cities of China where there are lot of high-end skyscrapers that have no occupancy at all. Just that in steemit there will be lot of users writing posts but not enough people reading them even if they are worthy. I hope Steemit addresses this problem by the earliest :)
Nice input! I like the idea of curation rewards for resteems!
Monkey Nuts
I had no idea that posts were not made more visible by upvoting them - I assumed that was part of the point of upvoting posts. I think most newbies to the site such as myself will assume it is a 'reddit' sort of situation where highly upvoted posts are more visible. Are the 'hot' and 'trending' posts not there based on upvotes, then?
I'm fairly new and still trying to wrap my head around all of this. My only reference is youtube where a like equals profit and a like on facebook acknowledges that I read the content.
I've been trying to raise my reputation and only voting while at 90% or better and my votes are still worthless. My posts are only bringing in less than 10 cents. I know it will get better with time.
I assumed that by voting for content that I enjoyed, that my vote would somehow propel the writer forward. I'm just plain confused.
I was thinking the same @ashley-ghastley.
Please read my post at https://steemit.com/steemit/@pjprivett/little-known-or-noticed-2
It deals with voting as a newbie, I'd be interested in your comments!
I will say it is a little surprising to hear some of the things you mention, and thank you for making that post so we can all be aware - however I'm sure there are reasons behind why these things have to be how they are. Your post is a little overly inflammatory - as in, it tends to be a little along the lines of "THE SKY IS FALLING!" whereas I'm sure there's lots of reasons for why these things work the way they do - if every new user could be super effective as soon as they signed up, then creating fake accounts and botting would be way too lucrative, and it ALREADY IS lucrative in some ways from what I've seen.
Thus although I DO wish there was a much more comprehensive guide to how Steem works for new users, I think many of these things exist for good reason and although it's frustrating, most of this stuff seems to come in time and be for the better, in the end.
Excellent response. I agree with everything you say.
Yes I think it needs adjustment.
Yes in fact people have suggested this before.
I forgot about delegation - that is one way to help I suppose this creates the whale issue again though. If you have substantial voting power does that reduce the need to actively curate? I suppose we would need data to assess this in practice.
It might reduce it if you become lazy and because of the rewards not changing too much cause of the curve, yes.
Since we also have the problems with distribution (not too many having a bigger stake to actively consider curation a way of earning), and although it over time is getting a lot better (and with new investors and curators coming to the platform its being spread wide even more) it could become a lot better if the delegation is spread among more curators and with the change in curation curve in mind it would work wonders for curators actually being rewarded a lot more for being the first to stumble upon great new and undervalued content.
Would also be nice if delegation could have more options for reward allocation so that inactive investors and whales would not need to rely on the curators sharing the curation rewards with them but it being done automatically instead thus incentivizing them to delegate more actively and to more users.
Yes in fact I think it was a big mistake not having this built in. Delegators should get something in return even if it isn't a 50:50 split they should still get something, as they are basically making an investment.
They shouldn't just be expected to do it as a charity service.
Exactly, especially since it only takes 10 votes daily now so any greedy investor will just throw em out quickly without care if its going to the right place or being distributed nicely instead of handing them over to a good manual curator knowing its doing a lot more good for the long term of the platform while still seeing some rewards from them.
you and @thecryptofiend raised so many good points
the sad part is no one up there seem to have even read this post
A lot of these changes have been / are being discussed. I was really in support of the idea of a delegator receiving a portion of the curation rewards that were earned from the delegated SP. It was discussed with the dev team, and unfortunately the math/computation to make it work was too complex. Something like that could be formed 'off chain' though via some type of delegation market. It is still early in the game. Something along these lines is still a possibility.
Would "Fabric" be able to do this? I think it is really important in order to make delegation truly viable.
great comments, great discussion / as a relative newcomer I enjoy the idea of curation and do try, but there are virtually no rewards. I'm all for a better system, probably about early, non-bot votes getting rewarded, yes !!
I completely agree. The way things are now, curators might be scared off by the penalty, which means they wait a few minutes to upvote a post. By then, the post is so far down the feed, never to be seen again, that the author misses out on a lot of eyes on their post. That's because people are more eager to check out a post with some upvotes already in place (though reputation plays a big role there too).
I think that's a really good point. It might help people who don't earn a lot with their posts to re-think their strategy and start upvoting more. Actually, maybe it would even get rid of some crap posts in our feed, because these people will be upvoting, instead of posting... Or is that wishful thinking?
"wrote this on my phone"
you deserve hazard pay
How do i uses the rewards to further my chances of making a little more. Any tips? And thanks for the guides on stuff
:)
Thanks a lot for the info I'm still trying to figure out how this whole steem thing works and this was very helpful
Is anyone aware of any accounts that do a daily best of summary. I think these have the potential to become very popular accounts but I am concerned that there is not much of an incentive to do the work. Maybe there could be a bonus for how the post was viewed? Whether it was found via your blog? Ie the more quality traffic a curator is able to send to a post the more rewards they receive as a curator? That would encourage community building....but once again, bots would probably be deployed in droves.
How much adderall do you have to take to comment 1 pagers
lol on the phone even xD
ATS token i.c.o offering free 75 tokens worth 10 $ , here is the link
https://steemit.com/ico/@kingjan/ico-for-authorship-com-tokens-is-open-for-investors
I have a reasonably large amount of SP and, though I'm capable of creating quality content and probably earning far more, have spent the last year or so mostly curating to try and help spread rewards.
Here's what I've found:
You need at least 200,000 SP to make curating worth your time, in the sense of earning a decent hourly wage (say, $25/hr). Which is why so few people are doing it
Curating + commenting + self upvoting your comments is the only way most people can justify the time spent curating
I find 5-7 posts each day that are valued at less than $5 and that I feel are deserving of more rewards. I write a comment, upvote my comment and upvote the post. As my upvote is worth about $5 I get paid about $15/hr to curate.... but I can only work about 1hr a day due to the SP drawdown. I have about 37k SP.
Now if STEEM would just hurry the hell up and go to about $5/$1Bn cap - which is where it should by by any valuation - we would see a whole different game. But the ironic thing is that Steem's success is the what is keeping the price down - people are actually making a living and selling Steem to cash out and the pay the bills. There is very little incentive at this point to power up, so more sellers than buyers.
I think we need to increase curation rewards in a way that cannot be gamed by bots.
Perhaps we have a timer. We know how many words per post and how long it takes the average human to read that many words. If the upvote is given before the timer expires the curation reward is far less than if the upvote is after the timer. Then we kill the bots and encourage people to actually read.
Then we go one step further and increase the curation reward if a comment is written. And the longer the comment the better the reward.
My $.02
Interesting. I suppose it is a paradox of sorts but at some point one would presume the situation would go viral and that would result in a rise in marketcap which would be sufficient to negate the cashing out. I think it happens with all (successful) cryptocurrencies.
thinking about it....
I manually curate, and haven't ever made a bot vote on this account.
I not only curate for good posts, but for good thoughtful comments.
Once you get away from the trending page, the comments are as scarce as the rewards.
The thing is, I don't make rewards by seeking out excellent minnows or voting on comments, which is fine, but I think it is part of the problem with how the curation rewards work.
I wish I had some solutions, but people are going to chase rewards, and I don't blame them a bit. ROI is a good thing and I know it is time for me to figure out how to use the site differently as well.
We could just ditch the trending and hot pages. Then people would have to sift through all the spam to get to the good stuff. That included those who want to game the system.
And keep the new posts page. Then we know where to find fresh content.
There is one other point that @scottsantens made: sometimes it takes more than a week for your post to be discovered. What if your post goes viral on the 8th day?
Most of those who have votes that matter at all are not sifting through anything. They setup their voting bots and make a few comments on their friend's posts.
So, basically, some people are treating, Steemit like a nepotism network, right?
Another question comes to mind then. How can one be objective about quality if they're voting on the work of a friend?
I'm not so sure that Steemit is looking to create that kind of reputation, but if enough people see that happening, they will see automated curation among a network of friends who are just passing the rewards between themselves.
I guess the word that comes to mind is "disappointment".
Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Exactly and this where the reverse auction perversely incentivises bot use.
It is easy to do that and also when you want to earn curation rewards using a bot you have to do it based on past success.
Yes very true.
[deleted -- decided to reply to parent comment]
I learned a lot, thanks!
Thats life!
True... and given that we're a decentralized structure, it strikes me as an open invitation to take a long hard look at structuring rewards as "tool" to guide how the site develops. In short "Put the carrots where you need the work to be done."
If course, that would require a lot of people to step OUTside their short term interests and instead look at big picture/long term benefits.
That is the hard part!
That's true
In short "Put the carrots where you need the work to be done."
^this.
I think this depends on your following a lot too, judging from what I've seen on some posts from people who joined my contest. There are some vibrant sub-communities here on Steemit.
I also get a couple of comments on every post I write, though ofcourse, it's hardly anything compared to Trending. That's mostly because posts on Trending simply get so many extra eyes on them, so it sparks a lot of discussion. I've noticed the same thing on most 'Steemit' tagged posts though. Mine never make anywhere near Trending/Hot rewards, but they get a huge amount of comments.
Yes! I try not to bother with timing too much and simply upvote when I read a post, but sometimes I catch myself thinking 'Hmm, maybe wait a minute or two...'. That's so wrong, because it takes away some visibility for the author. He/she needs all the votes he/she can get at the very start, when the post is still visible somewhere in someone's feed.
I also chase rewards sometimes, though most of the time, I try to be fair and upvote what I like. Either that, or upvote those people I appreciate here. Comments/posts alike.
Hello playfulfoodie, you do get excellent interaction on your posts, and because I look for comments to vote for I can attest that you are out there interacting in the community. I appreciate that.
Thank you @whatsup, that's a very kind thing of you to say :-)
Well, you do bring up a really important issue, here.
There are a lot of things about the original Steemit "intent" (as I interpret it) that I really appreciate.
I manually curate quite a bit-- but yes, it is time consuming. But I enjoy reading/interacting with quality content. This is a social platform to me, and I really like the "social" bits. So I curate both content and comments I feel are valuable or add something. The latter seems to be becoming rarer and rarer, sadly. I also really like the idea of Steemit being a sort of "gift economy" where the primary thing we do is "pay it forward." I like the idea that I can reward a content creator for something well done.
I DON'T like the whole "reverse auction" thing... and frankly, I just ignore it... probably to my detriment. When I have a response to a piece, it is NOW... I don't want to sit here and ponder "Oh, I wonder if my timing is right?" I don't like being under gun by a TIMER... sometimes I'm inspired to leave a 300-word comment... that takes TIME, and I don't want that to have an "opportunity cost" because now it will post "too late."
And that's another thing I DON'T like. The excessive reliance on automation and bots by many strikes me as counterproductive. Communities are built by PEOPLE, not by code, automation or bots. I'm not saying outlaw bots... but perhaps we can benefit from rethinking how they interact with the system. I know some bots are "human activated;" they retrieve a specific type of content for their operators who then curate manually... that's a great use of a bot. Others... seem like they only serve to add "dust" to the blockchain... a 0.3% bot upvote from an account with 3000SP? What IS that?
I am not a developer, but perhaps we can find a way that lifts-- not necessarily financially-- content that was "human upvoted/curated" as opposed to bot serviced to greater visibility, things might change. A sort of "This content was reviewed and approved by an actual HUMAN" stamp of approval as a mechanism to land something in "hot" or "trending."
One possible solution-- although I am not sure how to implement it-- would be the "gamification" of curation. Literally find a way to track and monitor what's being manually curated and have a "What people are reading" category next to "hot" and "trending" that is generated (again, I am NOT a developer!) by some weighted-average-algorithm that looks at manual curation and the SP behind that and comments being made and so on... a sort of "this is the best content if there were no bots" list. Just throwing it out there as a brainstorming topic...
Edited to add: To wit, this comment was probably added "too late" and I found this post "too late" (and that's not a complaint, just an observation) and as a content curator all I really care about is "is this content WORTHY?" not damn timers and clocks. Either the content is "good" or it's "not good." That worthiness doesn't increase or decrease with time. And that's where the curation system has "issues."
Great points not much to add really.
True and that is usually how I vote when I vote manually.
I ignore the "reverse auction" for the most part as well. From my understanding- the portion that you miss out on will be rewarded to the author instead. What a perfect way to give people a more rewarding upvote when my sp is so low!
I think what we need is to develop some type of system where we can use the wisdom of the crowd to identify quality posts / gems, and provide the information to the larger stakeholders so that they can review/upvote it.
The challenge is how to do this in a way that doesn't spam the stakeholders with non-quality posts.
I think that if there was an efficient way to provide the stakeholders with a list of actual quality posts, that many of them would happily vote for them. Changes to the actual platform may not be needed.
Yes although in some sense this is what is supposed to happen already, with the quality posts rising to the top. I think some of the curation guilds were also trying to achieve this but they also have some inherent problems. One alternative would be to have paid curators who only curate and don't actually post - not sure how you could guarantee that or indeed fund it.
I agree that it is how it is supposed to work, but the inherent problems outlined in your post are preventing it from working as designed. "The crowd" does not have enough SP to make any difference with post ranking, even if they find quality posts. Most of the stakeholders who can make a difference do not have the time to filter though all the content.
Those suggestions may work. I think we need to continue brainstorming on ways to channel the wisdom/efforts of the crowd into effective curation.
@timcliff & @thecryptofiend, I think we're starting to get somewhere, now... there might actually be a possible workaround that possibly could be modified to work here. Please indulge this quick "brain dump:"
Back "before God invented dirt" I was part of a content for rewards site named "epinions;" this was circa 1999-2000. User generated content; peer reviewed/curated. Pretty much the same issues we're facing here... after a while curation ended up being largely in the hands of a few hundred people who really "cared" about the site... NOT a viable system for sorting millions of posts. So an improved system was devised.
Now, my memory is a bit hazy, but here's the general gist: Using Steemit terminology, we would have a separate "curation reputation," earned literally as a result of interaction with content. It was simple-- you were either a "member" or a "bronze," "silver" or "gold" curator. Your curation status was independent of other activity... A gold curator could have 17 posts or 17,000 original posts. Anyway, the incentivizing part here was that your rank was basically a multiplier on your rewards... and (as I recall) there was also something built into it to where if you slacked off, you could lose rank as a curator.
I should add that the system was NOT "game proof;" there were always some people trying to beat the system, rather than use it. But it certainly DID get a lot more people involved in the "read and rate" process.
Now in the context of the Steemit ecosystem, a minnow could work his or her way to Gold curating level while still being a minnow from a posting perspective. Let's arbitrarily say that a "Gold" curator would have to read, vote and comment on at least 50 posts a day over a 30-day period to get there... and then maintain that to stay there. Which sort of addresses the issue of having both content creators and content consumers on Steemit. We could potentially attract people to Steemit who say "but I don't write," who could still earn viable rewards as curators. Mind you, for this to be financially viable, we'd probably need to go back to the 50/50 split.
As an additional wrinkle-- and look forward-- with "Communities" on Steemit becoming a reality down the road, the top curators in certain topics often ended up as "Community Managers" (which we may discover we need here), tasked with such things as recategorizing (in our case, re-tagging) content that was grossly miscategorized in attempts to falsely gain visibility... not sure how we'd do that here... maybe an authentic use for flags? These were completely voluntary (and unpaid) positions, but they rewarded indirectly because your name would be everywhere, leading to increased exposure to your content, hence increased rewards.
Again, I am NOT a developer, and NOT a blockchainiac... so I'm totally OK with you telling me to sit down and shut up! Just tossing it out there....
Edited to add: The reason I bring up this particular case is that of the 100s of attempts of "rewards for contents" epinions was the longest lived and most spam-resistant of all... I got my last royalty payment in 2014(!) before then owner eBay pulled the plug on paying contributors. 15 years is an eternity in "web years."
Really great ideas! I will have to think more about how this could be adopted to the blockchain technology, but it is a great place to start and gives lots of food for thought.
($171.00 PROMOTED POST GOT MY ATTENTION!)
"Put the carrots where you need the work to be done."
Does the [WALLET] [PERMISSIONS] [POSTING] in each Steemit account ONLY allow voting and resteeming capabilities without sacrificing Active and Owner keys that would give FULL access to that person who lets say was TEMPORARILY working on a shift to help CURRATE for 24hours or possibly weekly?
Given that person would get a pecentage of the rewards for the work and time and effort after his or her shift was finished and curation rewards paid out MANUALLY or AUTOMATICALLY.
TL;DR
Cuaration/Curator Position (FULL TIME or PART TIME)
Freelance Temporary with possibility of handling the Rented or Delegated Steemit Account after say 3-6months of Curration Performance.
Any wrong doing or misuse of this Rented/Delegated account would have the Permissions revoked or changed. (The posting key is used for posting and voting. It should be different from the active and owner keys.)
The posting key would give the ability to vote (curate), post, comment, and resteem without access to the account's funds. Giving the user delegated SP and asking for a cut would accomplish basically the same thing. smooth used to hire curators back in the day btw - pretty much exactly what you described.
Having a separate account NOT a personal account which may be seen to play favorites with having a particular steemit user name showing they UPVOTED or RESTEEMED a CURATED post. For example:
Newly Created Steemit account name
@curationteamsteem1
@curationteamsteam2
@mondaycurator
@tuesdaycurator
etc
These handles can be 25 rep with delegated or funded SP which can be recycled to the next Freelancer Temporary Curator. (a set of new POSTING keys would be recommended)
I suppose the question is, if such a system works most of the time does it matter? By trying to only find solutions that are 100% game proof we may end up with generally subpar systems in reality.
Further if such a system were found I am almost certain some person somewhere would figure out a means to exploit it
Bad human behaviour can never be completely eliminated. All you can do is try to mitigate against it where you can but it isn't always possible.
This is the difference between how many people who work in computing think vs what we see in biological systems.
Biological systems work optimally most of the time and in most situations, whether they work in exceptional circumstances or not is somewhat irrelevant.
I'm not saying we should ignore potential problems or risks only that we should not lose sight of what is important and the vast bulk of common circumstances, merely to mitigate against exceptions.
From where I am sitting, "mostly works" is a LOT better than "sometimes works."
Perfect solutions seldom exist outside of intellectual think tanks.
Exactly. Yet it seems some people are stuck in this form of thought.
Something I agree with
I see examples with this solution every day. There are curation guilds, trails, and groups of people who compile lists of quality content. It serves a purpose, is thoughtful and rewarding.
The problem arises where these people are paid to present someone elses content while the original author receives minimal rewards. No doubt due to similar reasons that you've outlined.
Another function that could fill this roll is resteeming. The issue here is that it's not rewarding at all and can be misused without even realizing it. (at least in the minds of your audience)
I think there are indeed better solutions and we should keep thinking to see what we can come up with that is fair, rewarding and effective.
Exactly. Thanks for you wise words mate. I'm just glad that there are people in the community like you who understand such issues and are thinking about it too. I am confident that it is a problem which we will find better solutions to through such discussion and probably some degree of experimentation. This is one of the reasons I find behavioural economics so fascinating - things don't always work out as expected and incentives are not always a simple thing.
@timcliff I described a filtering system that can allow us to do that and help curators a great deal. If you are interested: https://steemit.com/steemit/@borislavzlatanov/proposal-make-it-easier-to-find-quality-posts-on-steemit
@thecryptofiend I think my proposal addresses a lot of the problems you raised, too.
I would be happy to get some feedback because I currently don't know if people don't see my proposal as good or the post just doesn't get noticed amongst the flood of other posts.
Thanks for sharing I will give it a look when I have a moment. It is hard to get things seen in the sea of posts.
Would be honored to have you onboard
https://steemit.com/eos/@cyberspace/whitepaper-for-our-8-new-steem-projects-by-steemcentral-ml-a-new-steem-sub-platform-coincentral-and-cyberspace
It seems like an interesting project, but can you please explain what it has to do with our discussion on curation? The way it is randomly plugged as a reply to my comment kind of seems like spam.
The developer think tank has a dbase for centralizing these types of issues and solutions at http://developmentcenter.ml (linked in that article)
Cool, thanks!
I have a pretty good solution I think. Let people do what they want with their steem power:
By which I mean allow a 100% SP vote instead of a max 2% vote.
Kindof a jumbled mess of my thoughts now, I am working on cleaning this up and adding more arguments for it.
https://steemit.com/steem-ideas/@donaldtrumpfan/allow-a-100-sp-vote-the-best-voting-problem-solution
I don't think that would work. The slider already doesn't allow enough granularity and making it more sensitive to allow smaller gradations would make it even more fiddly to use. Interesting idea though - would be great if there were some way to test the effect like a pilot study assuming the granularity issue could be sorted out.
interesting post
Thanks.
Thanks for posting
Good information and point of view on things here. Resteemd
Thank you:)