DON'T REMOVE Curation Rewards! Just stop them when the post reach the trending page !!!

in steemit-ideas •  8 years ago  (edited)

After brainstorming with @smooth...

As we discussed many times it seems curation rewards don't work as intended !
I think the most problems regarding curation rewards would get auto solved if the system would use a treshold to stop them !

This treshold should be the success of the post to be included on the trending page (for example 20 top posts) When it gets to TOP 20 ... STOP the curation rewards!!!

Just let the people know after the curation reward get "deactivated" when they try to upvote...

I have opened a github issue also to get the attention we need from the steem/steemit developers but the most pressure comes from the community when it reaches consensus about any subject ;)
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/272

here from my conversation with @smooth ....

liondani 12:42 PM
have you 5 minutes for brainstorming?
about curation

smooth12:44 PM sure

liondani 12:44 PM
I thought this...
first of all I disagree to stop curation rewards
but I thought we can disable curation rewards when we reached a "treshold"
for example when the post made it to the trending page (top 50 post or something like that)
then curation rewards could stop

smooth 12:47 PM
that might work
but here's the thing. voting stuff on trending gives little to no curation reward. people just dont understand it

liondani 12:47 PM
IDEA !!!!!
what if when the treshold is met the system pop up a window message when someone upvotes that sais: "Post made it to the trending page so the curation rewards will be minimal! Are you sure you want to upvote and decrease your valyable voting power?"
or something like that
the userbase would be educated faster!

smooth 12:51 PM not bad

here is the https://steemit.chat/ screenshot...

Please give me your feedback about the idea and why not come up with a better one or "tweak" the initial one...

PS Special thanks to @smooth which is always ready to brainstorm and contribute in favor of the steemit community !!!

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It's an idea, but it needs implementation from the devs. Also, it will not only affect curation rewards but also, the post eventual value, maybe?
But I love the idea of people actually upvoting because they like the content so much that they think it's worth it!

smooth is smooth.

When we discussed it, I didn't envision it affecting the post value...at least not directly. If people are voting on trending posts because they want a piece of the big reward (which mostly doesn't work anyway) then those votes would stop because it would be completely clear there won't by any such rewards. In that case the post values for trending posts might end up lower. If people are voting because they actually believe the post deserves to be rewarded more then it already is then those votes (and the resulting post value) would be unaffected.

I'm curious to see what happens in practice. I say because as of now, it's unclear why a post gets popular, at least to me.

If people stop voting for trending posts just for the curation rewards it will reduce the post reward for sure as it will probably lead to getting just half of the votes it would normally get. The way steemit works at the moment with the higher the reward for the post the more value each next vote adds, even if the voting power of the user is not that big, we are probably going to be looking at significant reduction in the rewards earned by the top trending posts in the end. That happening may not be a bad thing actually as people's expectation for earning tens of thousands as a reward for a single post should become more realistic, though I'm sure some people won't be happy because they will be earning less with their posts.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

But the less they earn (what they "loose") will distributed to all other active posts from dolphins and minnows !!! (Since the steem each day contributed as rewards are the same! same pool for all)

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

That is why I've said it might not be a bad thing, especially on the long run... at the moment many things on steemit leave the impression that they are not well balanced, and are often at the two extremes. Like some good post getting 10K rewards, for various other reasons besides being good, while other good ones are struggling to get even 1 cent...

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

If they still vote the system will just inform them that they don't get any more curation rewards but the author still get's the added reward in case of further votes !!! (so the post value would not be unaffected!)

That is in order. I would gladly upvote post of someone doing something valuable like development etc. For me in this case it is not about curing rewards.

Upvoting because they like the content? Wow, what a novel concept!

Right now, a vast majority of curators are out to make a quick buck. It's very easy to learn and game the system. During my experiments with the curation articles, I was easily hitting 3% of my Steem Power per week.

It's pretty simple really, you just need to know the authors and topics that do well. You need to know the bots that upvote these authors, and at what time. More people are discovering these trends, and getting in on the action.

The end result is you see the same authors, the same subjects, the same tags on the Trending page day after day. The whales are doing a great job in diversifying content, but it's not enough.

I like the suggestion of offering a warning at the Trending page upvote. If a post is at $300, someone holding a lot of Steem Power can still receive a pretty decent curation reward for upvoting, so stopping it entirely will just discourage that. Instead, as @smooth points out, it's about educating the user that their upvotes have negligible impact.

But getting back to my initial rant, the main problem is well before the Trending page. People are simply much less motivated to check out and upvote content from an unknown other and a niche subject.

My suggestion would be along the lines of penalizing curation rewards on "sure shots". By successful authors, and in successful subjects. I should receive a much greater curation reward from upvoting a post by a new author talking about neuroscience than Dan talking about Steemit. I hope someone more attuned with algorithms reading this can make more sense of this thought.

Let's see how Hardfork 13 helps with the bots.

"The end result is you see the same authors, the same subjects, the same tags on the Trending page day after day." Absolutely agree! The system is closing itself this way. If the concept of Steemit is evaluation the "content" not more (the author for example), all articles, upvote and downvote have to be anonymous.

That's not realistic, but it will be an interesting experiment. I bet the trending page would then look completely different.

Completely different every single day! And exactly this will keep the fire of Steemit. Now the fire is only keen, but for how long? Why do you think it's impossible? Technically or for other reasons? It's just β version. A lot of improvements ahead. Although I'm not an IT, sure it could be. Too much information is shown to all users. Wallet, transactions, feeds, reputation ... The downvote must to be anonymous to work. No one wants to make enemies unless he is not the God.

The downvote must to be anonymous to work. No one wants to make enemies unless he is not the God.

^^^THIS
I had express the same idea before weeks and @ned seem to agree with it ;)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@anyx/cheetah-bot-the-fight-against-spam-and-plagiarism-continues#@liondani/re-rockymtnbarkeep-re-anyx-re-rockymtnbarkeep-re-anyx-cheetah-bot-the-fight-against-spam-and-plagiarism-continues-20160721t213857253z

My suggestion would be along the lines of penalizing curation rewards on "sure shots".

Or give a bonus to curators that found a successful "outsider"!!! ;)

Yes, that's a much more positive way to put it. :)

To be fair, the current system does reward large SP holders more with new finds, but it's the masses that need to get behind this idea.

yes, I agree. I suggested earlier in some discussion that it might be better to link rewards to reputation. As much as I like @complexring, I think it's unjustified that a post like this earns more than several small fish have in their entire accounts combined.

I would say that curation reward should be higher if you are early to up upvote a popular article from a newcomer with low reputation than from upvoting a 60+ rep account. Its very easy to just upvote anything from a high rep person, expecting it o do well without reading. With over 100 votes, that's what happened to that simple "test" post of complexring, which he justly tagged as "spam".

I suggested earlier in some discussion that it might be better to link rewards to reputation.

Me too ;) Take a look here ....
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/negative-voting-and-steem#@liondani/re-dantheman-negative-voting-and-steem-20160814t175827625z

I'm with you man! that's my point as well. I am not too happy with your solution, we don't need one that stifles upvotes, but maybe we can find a happy middle :)

Yeah, I didn't go into details as I'm well aware it sounds radical and controversial. But I'm sure someone good with the numbers can find a sensible middle ground.

the possibility of stopping curation will make some people to spend more time on steemit, trying to watch over their votes, which is also good thing about your suggestion

There are still a lot of things that users on steemit don't understand especially new ones... usually you learn how things work as you go on using steemit, or at least that is how I learned them.

The ones that don't understand how voting works and what is the idea of the curation rewards, should just try to learn more about voting power by reading or asking. If they are not willing to do even that, then well, let them vote as much as they want, for what they want, when they want, and they will just learn it the hard way... or not learn it at all and leave disappointed because they are "not making money on steemit".

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

Interesting idea. Thanks for sharing. One issue that I can possibly see with this, is that once a post has reached the trending page, curation rewards will already be quite small, won't they? Since the curation rewards are based on order of stake when voting, adding votes to an already highly-upvoted posts will probably only yield small rewards anyway for everyone except the largest whales. So the effect of this change will probably be small for all except the largest accounts. Or maybe that was the point all along :)

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

The point is to make it clear and certain that people should not vote up Trending posts on the basis of curation rewards. You are correct that the rewards are small in practice and that likely the smart thing to do anyway, but the formula is complicated and even if people understand it, they may still throw up a vote thinking that a chance to get 0.001 SP is better than nothing. When it is unambiguously zero then it is removed altogether as a reason to vote up those posts.

It would be more effective to show analytics in the curation rewards tab so that people who check their curation rewards realize that it's not the largest posts voted on the late that land them the most money. For things to be easy to compare, they need to be normalized. Columns in the table would be:

  1. position in the stake heap in % of total stake that voted on the post
  2. position in the accrued SBD in % of total SBD earned by the post
  3. curation reward in % of the total curation reward paid
  4. curation reward in SP
  5. voting time in minutes since posting

This should be enough for people to realize that finding unloved posts with potential where they end up being at the very bottom of the stake heap or closest as possible to 30mn or ideally both pays way more than herding behind already trending posts way past the initial 30mn. Naturally, people will realize that they are better off focusing more on new posts.

I don't think however that anything other than education / analysis tools should be done to force people to behave one way or another wrt to voting. Let's let stimulus, price control, and market regulation to central banks and financial regulators. Everyone will benefit much more from receiving basic education about curation mechanics, and they will be able to apply that in many other areas where the very same holds true like picking stocks.

Wow! I totally support this proposal. This is very well thought out. Also there is a problem with stopping the curation reward. Top 1 isn't top 2 or top 3 etc. and this is up to the curator to decide which of the post has the most value. @recursive I really love your proposal and I really feel like it would be a great update.

I would be interested to see how your proposal would do as a post on it's on.

Thanks @teamsteem. Blogging isn't really my thing and I'm much more comfortable making short contributions right at the spot where they are relevant than trying to make structured and interesting blog posts but if you think you can help giving some more visibility to this idea by writing a proper blog post, feel free to post about it, and copy/paste any amount of what I wrote or rephrase / adapt it as you see fit. Post the link here so that I can upvote your post :)

Awesome! I'll look into this!

Certainly an interesting idea @liondani, it makes no sense to give curation rewards when the content has already been curated a lot!

Oh, thank you for this post, there was a lot of talks about it.
It's really not about $$$... people won't get rich for just curating. Gamification matters.
People feel great if they successfully find something interesting. People feel great if they can use their Steem Power for others' sake.
Most concerns are about so called whales and their votes, as it makes them profit even for curating blindly. Minnows on the other hand don't get a lot of profit, but get a lot of fun. Making curation rewards super-linear could solve that problem.

Gamification is what makes this so addictive to me. I get like 2c for finding a good post but it's fun to try to guess which will be good and time it. I can't put my phone down. My data is through the roof, I keep getting distracted and losing things. Curation rewards are key! I think it would help drive adoption if newbies had a better shot at curation rewards. I know they don't want a lot of bots here but maybe you could give newbies super votes ( only when at 100 percent) that lets them earn rewards at least once a day. (As @dantheman said here the optimal minnow strategy is not to vote).

Instead of whales needing to remove their vote once a post hits the trending section, maybe for every X number of steem power you should get some sort of vote that boosts popularity but not dollar amount. Removing the need to go back and remove a vote.

I also think it would be interesting if we could choose to upvote more than once. It would use the same amount of voting power for each vote, but I think it would be an interesting topic to discuss.

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That is Genius!!!!

Do you know if there is still serious talk about removing curation rewards? I have an idea that I think could help address the problems I saw being discussed by @dantheman, but don't know if this is still under consideration.

Also, thanks for the recent up vote on my post about how to drive real business value to increase the market cap on Steem!

They had to much resistance about removing curation rewards, so I assume they try to figure out better solutions than that...

My pleasure ;)

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

If I understand @smooth correctly, he is saying that there are already no significant curation awards for trending posts. The only problem is that people do not realize that. If correct, that means there is nothing to change, except better user notification.

I noticed that the "Potential payout" number that you get when you click on the payout amount below each post is NOT an estimate of what you are going to receive. It seems to be an estimate of what the poster might receive. Perhaps it would be better to replace this with (or add) an estimate of the amount you, as the curator, can expect to receive. I do not know enough to judge how feasible that is, but a rough, probabilistic estimate might still be better than nothing.

I think putting a cap on the curation awards is a great idea. Where to set the threshold is an interesting discussion. One idea I've seen is once it reaches $1,000 but as the price of Steem goes up/down over time, that may turn out to be a bad way to set the limit. The position on the trending page is good because it isn't tied directly to the value of Steem.

This is a user interface problem. Steemit.com frontpage should be changed to something else so that trending is not the default view. Maybe user's own feed would be best choice at the moment.

People will still want to look at trending. That would probably help a bit, but the top most popular most money-making posts is always going to be an intriguing concept.

If the front page were configurable, how many users do you think would choose Trending? i think a lot. Given the open architecture, if users want that they will get it, with a different client if necessary.

Most of the posts in trending are not really that interesting to me, so I don't look it very often. When we will see more and more different writers here, trending will become even more diversified.

My guess is that in the long run trending won't be very interesting for most of the people because they don't want to see everything. They want to see only what is interesting to them, not what is interesting to the whole Steem community.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

user's feed don't help the platform to discover new good authors!

It can be a mix of own feed and some algorhitm that recommends new users/posts.

very interesting idea. I agree with you. I think it must be applied.
thank you @liondani & @smooth for giving this idea :D

I've just written this article concerning a flaw (as I see it) in the voting system and the solution I found. I'd be happy if you could read it and give me a feedback ;)

https://steemit.com/steemit/@glitterfart/the-flaw-of-the-current-voting-system-and-an-actual-solution

This certainly seems like a good idea. I am glad that we have so many members of the community working so hard to evaluate every option as Steemit moves forward.

stopping curration rewards, will end up in half visitors on the site... just watch the stats and see.

She/he suggests stopping the rewards only after the post is trending. Although this is pretty much already in effect, but the suggestion to notify people that the rewards are less for voting on whats already trending, will discourage this bad gaming strategy.

cool nicely done again

please up-vote my cheatsheet post for markdown. here

Excellent idea.

I would like to know how to remove curation awards for a particular post. Is there a tutorial you can provide? I'm going to upload it and continue searching. I'm not aware of where to access information to turn off the curation of rewards on a post. I'm uploading the DTube video now.