RE: 'Interesting' content > Trending?
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."
=^..^=