'Interesting' content > Trending?
One totally unworkable and exploitable way to organise Trending - Volume 1 (of mostly likely, 1)
I should probably be out in the sunshine this afternoon, and will be heading there shortly, but I had to get my daily dose of Blockchain mayhem and thought this might be 'interesting'.
So we've all deciding that 'Trending' isn't the best at present to look for good or interesting content. Although, I've had a look today and actually think it's not so bad. Just rename the link to 'Adverts and Circle Jerked content', and problem solved :)
Anyway, with a little SQL code and a bit of faffing in Paint, I present to you an alternate top 10.
Interesting Posts
Below is what 'Trending' would look like (only posts in last 24 hours included so not quite accurate to 'Trendings' algorithm) based on comments on the post, containing the word 'interesting'.
First thing I notice is 10 different Tags, and none of them are 'steemit'. hmmm
Second thing is the range of pending payout values, a possible sign that 'interesting' does not equal post value (or number of SBDs sent to Bidbot).
I've read all 10 of these posts, and personally (and obviously this is where everyone's view will be different), I would say these posts are on average, fairly interesting.
Here's the list is you fancy a look:
| Account | Post | Interesting |
|---|---|---|
| talanhorne | muppets-infinity-war-part-3 | 10 |
| annajs | hi-i-m-anna-introducemyself-find-beauty-in-the-small-things | 6 |
| cynetyc | bedbf770-577f-11e8-8cf9-1b93be2e52ab | 6 |
| adsactly | adsactly-tech-news-an-exploration-of-transhumanism | 5 |
| victorbz | a-question-about-photography | 5 |
| yoo1900 | support-minnows-date-14-5-2018-promote-content-on-steemit | 5 |
| marketstack | visualizing-alt-coin-correlation | 5 |
| tarazkp | when-will-i-grow-up | 5 |
| steevc | desert-island-music-challenge | 4 |
| kingscrown | will-this-travel-ico-revolutionize-the-online-travel-industry | 4 |
Congratulations @steevc and @tarazkp for making my 'interesting Trending' list! :D
Have a good day all!
Asher @abh12345
I am half of the @steemcommunity witness, alongside @paulag.
Find out more about our project here
I think the whole issue is just the idea that the "highest quality" content will rise to the top. I don't think there's any way to achieve that without using human curation.
Any change that is made to the trending algorithm will just be gamed like @fullcoverbetting already said and we'll end up back where we started.
I think your idea of renaming trending is probably one of the best I've heard (though I might choose a different name!). But why not just call it what it is? "Highest Promoted Content" or something like that. Even if a post doesn't use any bots or pay for promotion, any upvote is promotion, and trending is just the posts with the highest amount of stake-weighted upvotes.
After my recent post on voting bots I have another post in the works about how I think the stated goal of "highest quality content rising to the top" can actually be achieved through a partly human-curated "trending" page on sites outside of steemit.com (similar to how Utopian works). Hopefully I'll be able to get that one finished a bit more quickly!
Could we try various options for the trending page like # of votes and cumulative reputations?
Not too happy seeing you bot your replies to the top of my posts, whatever.
I'm looking at unique account cumulative rep votes/comments, and agree it could be interesting.
I wrote a post a month ago about a new page besides the trending and hot page.
The idea behind it was based on the thrash which is on the trending page.
Just like @abh12345 I do find interaction one of the most important things in the steem ecosystem, so why not create a ranking based on interaction, hence comments.
I do know no matter what ranking will be created there will be mazes in the net which will be exploited!
You can read it here:
https://busy.org/@fullcoverbetting/steem-feature-request-let-s-make-interaction-more-important
Together with @sbcbot community (don’t be fooled by the bot in the name) we are trying to encourage our members to post and interact.
The biggest problem here according to me is the low level of post versus comment ratio. Reports indicate that we only just reach a ratio of 2.6!
That is compared with old social media a shamefull performance!
Asher is doing great with his league to try to change this! And @paulag is doing the same for the Indonesian community! I can only encourage this!
At the moment I am running a world cup contest and the comment counters is at 125! Okay it is a contest, no upvote, resteem or any other requirements to enter, but still 125 comments. Each comment is for me a chance to discover new people. But it will never reach the trending or hot page, while it does bring added value to the steem blockchain! How wrong is that! Some people might argue that it does not bring added value but it does for some!
I will stop ranting 😂 because it does frustate me a little bit.
If you have 5 minutes spare time feel free to join to contest. Would appreciate it!
Yes I think that is the case - but stake weighted votes may not be helping 'highest quality' make it to the top. And so I can faff around with stuff like this :)
I've not got round to a second reply to you on your post yet, and do plan more on the subject myself.
Did you see? https://steemit.com/steemit/@nealmcspadden/account-based-voting-is-a-terrible-idea-for-steem#@ned/re-nealmcspadden-account-based-voting-is-a-terrible-idea-for-steem-20180515t021921631z
It's a bit of a needle into some of your Posts' argument I think, but there's no point throwing shit over the wall - I'm looking forward to your next piece on helping to iron out this one.
Cheers!
Funnily enough @tcpolymath sent me a link to your post here just a few minutes ago. If you read @ned’s second comment he basically says this is just one thing hey are considering. No definite plans.
I wrote a post a couple hours ago about some factors that I think would go into a quality author score. Hypothetically a quality author creates interesting content.
I think with some experimentation we can get a pretty good fit on author quality with data scrapes from the blockchain. It would take some hefty processing though to do an analysis compared to other authors on the fly as opposed to some fixed standard.
So, why not implement human curation on the bids before the votes? A Newspaper doesn't let any advertiser advertise regardless of content. They are all filtered before publishing as what they print is their responsibility which is the problem with the bidbots currently; high reward, close to zero responsibility.
It's slowly heading in that direction, but you have to understand that this is entirely controlled by the delegators, not the bot operators like myself. If I just go ahead and implement human curation and as a result reduce the delegators' returns then they can just turn around and move their SP to someone who doesn't give a shit which I think would be a lot worse for everyone.
So I have to take slow, careful steps to try to improve things and encourage others to do the same along with me or else we could end up in a much worse situation.
Also regarding your newspaper analogy, in this case the "newspaper" is really steemit.com, and they do allow any advertiser to advertise regardless of content. I can't change that. I take slow, careful steps to try to improve things, like i said, with the understanding that my delegations can disappear at any time, for any reason, and then you'll have someone new to deal with, who, my guess is, will not be as open to discussion and change as I, and many of the other bot operators, currently are.
I do concede it is partly the problem of the decentralized 'newspaper' called steemit.com that are not helping themselves at present by letting anything have the chance to appear on the home page - If we look at amazon listing products, surely these adverts for products are vetted before being listed?
If I go to amazon to buy something, I'll look at the reviewer comments and rating of the product by said reviewers before deciding which option to go for. This seems loosely like 'account based' voting - and the money in your bank account doesn't mean you can give more stars than 5.
Sadly, it seems we're not going to have the option to sort by single account votes here in the near future - and of course it could be gamed anyway. So are we looking at an amalgamation of votes, comment quality, engagement, reputation of voter/commentator, some key words like 'interesting', 'excellent', to give an overall score for the article?
It's not going to be easy to solve this!
Yeah, I can understand that view.
But, this is like flagging, it is up to the community and currently, the community resources are largely pooled into bidbot delegations so the majority of content choice power lays with where the power lays.
So, why are we creating investment opportunities and hoping to attract investors who don't care about the community at all?
Totally.
Matt has mentioned continuous improvement, for me this is a whitelist (list the whole of Steem bar the current blacklist), and manual checks on bids (perhaps over a trendable sized bid), for starters.
We currently have an extensive blacklist and also a whitelist for accounts allowed to bid over 50 SBD/STEEM.
The Blacklist just looks like job creation for the boys - add 15 names a day to a post and upvote to $100. I've just this morning sent 250 or so accounts to Patrice and it only took 20 minutes or so.
Surely just whitelisting everyone not blacklisted already is the way to go?
The bots are maxed out at present so I don't think income is a problem
A weekly call for whitelist additions could be put out - as an advert.
I'm thinking the accounts that need advertising @deepdives, @musing, @creativecrypto, @hyperfundit.com, etc from trending have existing Steem accounts that know the drill already and so they would come to you first, or know how to contact someone to be whitelisted sharpish.
And if the bids start falling away (I really don't see an issue with this at present!) then send the bot curation teams out to go look. The last time I queried new posts by new accounts for the previous day, it took about 10 mins to check who produced anything of reasonable quality or not.
Hey abh12345, great post and I agree the "Trending" is more like "Promoted" or "Adverts and Circle Jerked content" lol
I think human curation is part of the solution, but there needs to be a second layer that's detailed to the specific user's experience. It would be ideal if steemit asked "what are your interests" upon logging in the first time, like many sites do; but they don't so could this be developed by say the @busy.org team?
I've also been thinking, it's the same 50 or so accounts that takes the top three on a rotational basis. What if someone were to build an app/extension that can hide author posts? Then each reader can decide for themselves, what is worthy of trending for themselves.
Just throwing some thoughts out here, what do you think?
(I just took a chance with bidbots and it's been working out, I don't actually know anyone from high up)
Some would argue that even "human curation" won't get the "highest quality" rising to the top.
Of course. "Quality" is always subjective so no matter what happens some people will disagree. However human curation is definitely the best method that currently exists for determining subjective quality.
Yes, nicely put:)
That's what I thought too, but take it a step further and have two Trending pages; one called "Bought and Paid For" and the other called "Organically Grown"...keep everyone happy :)
I think people are drawn to "rankings;" just look at sports.
So the idea of simply renaming "Trending" and instead call it "Richlist" makes a lot of sense. "Richlist" simply means here's a list of the top valued posts on the site and makes no claims as to whether they are good, bad or indifferent OR whether they got their by bot vote, whale circlejerk or any other means. But they allow — perhaps even more so — people to readily see "who's getting paid how much."
=^..^=
This is like a magazine that i can siff out everyday to digest interesting posts that are trending. As for me whos using my phone and a weak wifi id appreciate it if you continue this posts @abh12345
Well my solution won’t work for just about everyone else but it works fine for me. I even get to be lazy and act like a cat waiting for the good stuff to roll in. I follow 58 people who cover many different topics I find interesting. I get to avoided the nightmare of steemit trending unless someone resteems it to me. In which case many lolz have been had at how much these people are blowing.
Would be nice if we had more options to configure our trending page. Include a max of 12 hours on it. Have the ability to strike certain tags or authors.
At very least it be nice if front page trending had a different algorithm. It’s sad when blog gets front page trending and has 3 comments. Even worse when you are trolling one and get top comment on one and earn a whopping 4 cents or whatever it was I did a few months back.
Surely they can look at different factor points to try and provide a better experience without crippling the blockchains freedom. Then again what I have in mind and what they have in mind I doubt are the same thing. Maybe its best we don’t see 101 post on front trending all saying how steemit will moon any moment now and everyone going be zillionaires!
Best thoughts. Time limit of 12 hours, limit of once per week, must have “engaging” comments, should have a few upvotes not just 10 bidbot ones, and an active author who is on and engaging with the comments. Front page should be our best foot forward showing the world. While I would also like to have a min. reputation level well people can just buy rep 60 in under a week so that kind of pointless. That would also piss off some powerful people.
58 is a pretty streamlined set of people :)
I saw one of these today actually. That's what you get when you boost a cake recipe into Trending as a newbie.
I'm starting to think that is the issue, a different vision. And yes I agree we don't need those. And we don't need cakes either.
Yeah I agree with the final paragraph, it's just the we need code for 'engaging', that's the sticking point. The front page should be something that makes the CEO proud to be on Bloomberg.
Indeed it is. Maybe you should let them know for 50 SBD (I mean they already spent hundreds so why not) you will send them over some engagers to liven up there comment sections! Now that is going be a strange one when people start just selling commenting services to try and look like its a successful blog.
Ha!
Now that is an interesting one!
Personally I couldn't bring myself to do it, if I've got nothing positive to say, I just move on to the next one.
When the poster pays you in advance :)
Ok I know I just told you elsewhere I didn't think anything automated would be satisfactory, but now that I've read this I have a thought: what about if we used the opposite of @pleasestop? Presumably whatever machine-learning scoring method it uses could be reversed to give posts a quality comment score.
Gamifying that would primarily involve curating and rewarding quality comments, which is a behavior we want, yes?
Indeed :) @pleasestop are ya listening? :D
I think today's quick whip-up of posts above is arguably as gooda representation of 'interesting' than what we see on Trending.
I'll look a drumming up a few more of these, if just to spark people into thinking of other ways we can produce an alternate Trending.
I'll go bug him in his comments, he gets no end of mentions.
Just in terms of what we can do right now, I'd support replacing Trending with a list of the most recent posts Curie has upvoted. That would be a huge improvement while we worked on ways to make it even better.
Curie used to have the one of the biggest combined votes, and I agree things would look better. Although, no 'politics', and no 'steemit'.
So this is cool, I'd be interested in collaborating on something like this and sharing my thinking into the work I'm doing and how we could use a similar approach here.
Fun article @abh12345. Happy to see @steevc in the list, especially as I used the word "interesting" in my comment to him. 😂
You were actually in the top 15 yesterday with 4 'interesting's :D
Wow. I'm impressed!
How interesting @abh12345! 😂
Interesting, I wonder what you just did for the word interesting? Will it become the new buzz word for commentators; "I find your point of view to be very Interesting."..."You content was very Interesting"..."It was interesting seeing the process"...I think I have used those phrases a few times. Just think if you re-checked this in one month would you see an increase in the usage of the word? It would be rather interesting to see the results since they have removed the little "views" eye from post.
I guess they just could not figure out how to let steemians know how many people looked at their post. Seems kind of odd when the rest of the internet can give you visits counts, and unique views counts. So either those stats just do not work with steemit, or they are easily manipulated, or they were accurate and vote buyers were beginning to get embarrassed with the number of votes and only 4 page views.
So it will be "interesting" to see how many more post make an "Interesting tab page", and how many of them will now be bought and paid for. Yeah, I'm not cynical.
But at least I have a few "Interesting post" to go look at.
Interesting points :)
I might run the query tomorrow and see if we've had an uplift in these comments.
Any ideas for a data-pull, let me know.
If I think of any I will let you know. I like these, "here is what I found Data set wise" post of yours.
Cheers :) There will likely be more in the future!
Brilliant @abh12345 - so you going to do this on a regular basis for all of us then? hehe ;) you should create a tag for it....
or.....
You could just follow my awesomesauce @steemitbloggers family feed :)
ok... you can go play in the sunshine now :D
Well the query included everything posted yesterday, so it is 'all of us' if that's what you mean?
I've done lots of weird ad-hoc personalised data pulls, you can probably find one last month which has a full list.
A sound option!
OK, Sunshine!
hahaha delayed reaction on my part... I got distracted haha! Hope you enjoyed the sunshine :)
haha nice plug @jaynie :)
hahaha gotta do what we gotta do hey ;) lol
I agree completely! I'm happy to plug steemitbloggers to anyone who will listen!
By the way, I saw your "look what I do with spam comments to my private message on Discord"...chat tonight. hahaha You really are my kind of girl :)
@lynncoyle1 lol ;)
It would be interesting how people would exploit the algorithm haha
I am interested how the Hivemind and Communities will do this with code and parameters and being non techy I can't understand most of the stuff in the github.
The good person token is being touted as the bid bot killer bt some and I am still waiting on the verdict on that one but hopeful.
Anything in life can be exploited you just need to know the rules to circumvent it.
even if you put views, number of comments each one can still be exploited it would take in my opinion a real human being moderating to do some good but then tastes are very objective.
You may be interested in this short but interesting response from the boss:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@nealmcspadden/account-based-voting-is-a-terrible-idea-for-steem#@ned/re-nealmcspadden-account-based-voting-is-a-terrible-idea-for-steem-20180515t021921631z
Mhh, I should have added interesting to my world cup contest :) and put in the requirements that everybody had to included to word interesting in the comments :)
Comment counter at this moment stand on 124 :). Sorry 125. I would have crushed it!
But thanks for pointing out these articles, I will give them a read!
First comment and they are already thinking of ways to exploit! :D
Interesting how the mind of the Steemian works!
Ginabot rules :)
Well to be honest I never have felt like an entrepreneur until I started to get some interaction on my Steem blog! Never to late to learn I guess!
Never too late to learn how to play the game, you are right :)
Just equalize the paid bots to the promotion tools (because they are promo tools in fact), and all our Trending will move to the Promoted section.
Then our new Trending page will remain for organic curation, to show good posts discovered/evaluated by other members of community according to the Steem White Paper. That's all! The problem solved!
The people outside of this platform making their first glance on Steemit will see really interesting posts.
They will see posts voted by the highest stake holders who like to vote each other, irrelevant of the interest. I think we need a bit more than this.