Steemit is being abused by people who are gaming the system. I have some improvements to suggest which will improve the quality of Steemit’s content, and bring in more users, and boost the price of Steem.

Comment spam

We want to encourage good authors and discourage spammers. I hate “comment spam”.

When I see it, my only option is to reply along the following lines:

How would I improve it?

Give users more curation options e.g. “How much does the above post cotribute to the debate” Or, “Is the above post useful to other readers?” Or “Does it look like a spam comment?”. Curators should not be penalised for scoring the comment nor should they be rewarded. No bot or self-scoring allowed.

Bots

I am also against most bots. There are a few good ones, like @Cheetah. The vast majority are just there to milk the reward pool at the expense of humans. It would be better if most bots could not participate in the rewards pool. By excluding them from the rewards pool, it would encourage more meaningful human dialog in the comments section.

Some low quality posts have received hundreds of “up-votes”, but only about a dozen page-views. Most of those votes were by bots on the Blockchain. The blogs were never read. That kind of behavior doesn’t encourage the best bloggers to keep posting high quality content.

Quite the opposite, bloggers then go for a higher quantity of articles. Inevitably, much lower-value articles. Popular writers know that they will receive lots of robot upvotes, even if they write a rubbish post. They are incentivised to go for short-term profits instead of high quality. Most Bots do not encourage good quality posts. Some they pretend that they do. Most of them have been created for the sole purpose of milking the reward pool.

How would I improve it? Firstly, remove the rewards from the bots. It would be easy to set up “bot traps” to discover who is a robot. Robots could be prevented from voting with a captcha system. Annoying as it is to humans, a captcha would ensure that only humans judge humans. When Steemit was young, I could see the merit of bots to encourage writers. Now Steemit has enough human curators to not need the robots any more.

In other words, leave the reward pool to be allocated by humans, not robots.

7 Day rule

Another bee in my is the 7 day rule. You only get paid for 7 days after you have written a blog. That just seems wrong.

If I was to write a book, like “Harry Potter”, or “War and Peace”, and it was still selling 20 years from now, I would still be being paid by most publishers. If the publisher were Steemit, I would only be paid for 7 days. It’s not worth the effort. Why would I bother?

I am sure that many aspiring authors avoid Steemit because of the seven-day limit on rewards. I would like to see Steemit include long term material, not just topical posts. I would like to find books and manuals. Unless Steemians can earn rewards for years into the future, why would they write anything long, like a book - e.g. “Idiots Guide to Steemit”.

I know a writer of short children’s stories. She gets royalties on her books for years after they have been written. There is no incentive to publish them on Steemit.

How would I solve this?

Simply scrap the 7 day rule in favour of a longer period. Perhaps authors could “buy” a longer period of several years. Personally, I would prefer it to be free for everyone and for at least 10 years. Good books would then be published on Steemit instead of paper.