RE: *TrufflePig*: A Bot based on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to support Content Curators and Minnows
Hey @smcaterpillar, this is the Sorin human who has spoted you as an underrated contributor to a better world ! I'll be in Berlin on March 15th and 16th, would you perhaps care to meet in person?
A few comments on your post: given widespread payout manipulation, a more complex algorithm will certainly improve the results in the future. You write "The basic idea is to use well paid posts of the past as training examples to teach a Machine Learning Regressor (MLR) how high quality Steemit content looks like" - that is good enough in a first version but in the long run it is not the best value-adding approach because it offers "reflexion" / "echo" and encourages "more of the same".
The referential for what "quality" means should be external to the mechanism that Steemit uses to value posts, otherwise it comes very close to what Baron Munchhausen was doing by "pulling himself up by the straps of his boots".
I'm not so sure if my bot makes the world any better. I'm at least glad that Steemit operates on proof of (delegated) stake and is not as wasteful as BTC. So at least my bot doesn't make the world any worse.
You do have a point regarding the massive manipulation due to voting bots and services. By the way, irony intended by using such a service for your comment?! :-D
However, I beg to differ here at least to some degree. If there wasn't any correlation between payouts and quality than Steemit's premise as a curation platform due to proof of brain and sheer existence would be fruitless. So the bot's idea is to pull back attention from the voting bots and steer the platform as whole more towards rewarding quality content, whatever this is.
This brings me directly to my second point. What is quality content? This is really hard to evaluate. Is it something chosen by a jury or high intellectuals? Or stuff picked directly by the readers themselves?
TrufflePigrelies on the latter. Yet, if there was some external measure of quality, what would it be?Of course, the taste of the masses may not cater to the taste of an individual. For instance, I can't stand most of today's popular or chart music :-D. Finding content that is right for you, in particular, is definitely not the aim of @trufflepig. However, I do see the need for more personalized recommendations. To quote the wise words from someone who knows much, much more about this platform than me (@lextenebris):
I'm experimenting currently how I can reuse parts of the bot to create more personalized recommendations. So stay tuned.
Sure, why not, added you as a connection.
"By the way, irony intended by using such a service for your comment?! :-D"
Absolutely ! I'm experimenting in order to learn because the whole mechanics is not only complex it is also obscure (probably on purpose). I intend experimentation to go on at several levels - for instance I've "pumped" my last post over the $100 bar, see if this psychological threshold plays any role here ... not sure but we'll see. I do believe my post is good though :-)
Then back to the trufflepig discussion - I absolutely agree that the whole idea of rewarding content in Steemit is valid: there definitely IS correlation between payout and quality! But my argument went to the "second degree" and looked at trufflebot: since the correlation is not 1 and Steemit is ALREADY using this assessment dimension, re-using it in trufflebot is "procyclical" and reinforces whatever bias this dimension has.
On the contrary introducing another assessment dimension helps to give more balance and offers an alternative. Precisely because it's difficult to say what is quality and all we know is that the equation "high payout = quality" certainly does NOT hold (not 100%, not for all posts anyway) then maybe we can do better by defining quality along more than one axis / dimensions
And the idea is that through the trufflepig YOU, the owner of the bot, are free to define your own assessment dimension. Some people will certainly disagree with your choice of what you consider to be quality but so what ? They are free to create their own trufflepig and train it with their parameters if they wish.