A Statistical Look At @Tagalong

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My original title for this article was "Should @Tagalong Stay Away From #Steemit", but once I started writing it, I realized that #steemit (the tag) isn't the problem. I've been heading up the @Tagalong project for nearly a month now and the insight it's given me into the current Steemit climate has been interesting to say the least, downright frustrating to say the most.

If I can have seven minutes of your time today, I've got a few of them to share with you. However I must warn you in advance that I will be asking you for your action at the end, so if you don't really care about the @Tagalong project and what we're attempting to accomplish, then you can go ahead and move right along there, mister/missy. No hard feelings. I promise.

If you're interested in what we're learning and would like to help, then by all means please stick around. I've saved you a seat!

Without further ado, here's "Why Steemit Sucks and We Should Let the Past Die...Kill it if we have-"

wooookay there Kylo. Calm down. It's not that bad.

Let's look at some statistics.

Not What I was Expecting

The first and most realistic thing I can show you is statistics. Cold, hard numbers. I've spent a lot of time compiling the first month's efforts into understandable metrics to show off, and what they've revealed is quite interesting. Let's start with success rates. Below is a list of every change/flag in @Tagalong's history of service***.

Tag	# of Changes	# of Flags	Success Rate
#steemit	26	35	42.62%
#writing	3	29	9.38%
#life	5	26**	16.13%
#travel	0	24**	0%
#introduceyourself	9	21	30%
#story	1	19	5%
#fiction	1	17	5.56%
#steem	9	9	50%
#photography	1	8	11.11%
#contest	1	4	20%
#nature, #colorchallenge, #meme, #money, #video	0	4	0%*
#kr	1	3	25%
#art, #news	0	3	0%
#crypto, #health	0	3	0%*
#spanish	0	2	0%
#blockchain, #funny	0	2	0%*
#photo	2	1	66.67%
#blog, #family, #freewrite, #love	0	1	0%
#cn, #deutsch	0	1	0%*
#baby, #horse, #witness, #artzone, #article, #giveaway	1	0	100%

* These flags are all specifically related to ongoing action against a single spam account.
** 20 of these flags were issued to a single user that has since corrected their tag usage.
*** There are currently 2 users on @Tagalong's blacklist that receive flags instantly without explanation or warning every time they post with incorrect tags: @peaceloveliberty and @zaynwalker.

Accounting for outliers, our highest traffic tags are #steemit, #writing, #introduceyourself, #story and #fiction. (This is mostly because I'm one doing the searching and curating and I stick to writing tags.) With #steemit, our change-to-flag ratio is about 40%, which is near average for the overall success rate. Many users use #steemit when they don't know what else to tag with and are willing to update tags when prompted/provided another option.

#writing, #fiction and #story are another thing entirely. Our success rate in these related categories overall totals to a dismal 7.14%. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case:

• Poor curation from accounts like @wafrica, @silvergoldbotty/@ssg-community and @kryptonia, often automatic, that continues to incentivize improper behavior.
• Continued abuse by accounts like Instructor2121 on @wordsthatflow that are beyond @Tagalong's scope to impact.
• Incentivized short-form content (not poetry- suited for #blog or #life) that doesn't belong in #writing.

#introduceyourself is a nightmare, but one that's important to curate with @Tagalong so that a precedent of correct tagging is set from the get-go. There are other services like @intro-bot that help, but the battle is an uphill battle due to accounts like @partiko that continue to reward users after their first #introduceyourself post, thereby incentivizing the behavior for redfish. And don't even get me started with people like @the.success.club who bid-bot #introduceyourself for visibility.

The simple truth of the matter is that @Tagalong still doesn't have the VP to significantly deter impropper tagging by anyone other than redfish (which is why my ongoing joke in certain Discord communities is that I thrive on the tears of redfish). I fully believe that @Tagalong's success rate could be higher, but in order to get it there we're going to need more Delegators willing to fight abuse. Current VP sets the average 20% per tag flag at -0.017 STU or just under $0.02.

Plankton-Spam

HF20 did a phenomenal job at reducing the auto-spam from redfish accounts and the impact on the created feed is noticeable. It didn't begin to scratch the surface of the manual and auto-spam that emanates from plankton, however. Because I spend so much time dredging the created feed, I've accrued a list of over fifteen accounts that regularly post spam content without any kind of RC consequences because they have the SP to do it. To make matters worse, often times this spam is outside of @Tagalong's jurisdiction. Have a look at @theinvisibleman, who posts the same stories over and over again with names replaced or @wordsthatflow, a circle-jerk account upvote dump which posts 6-7 spam posts to #writing, #story and #fiction a day. One from this morning's dive posts meaningless text posts every day in order to farm @kryptonia upvotes for a value of up to 0.14 STU or $0.14 per post.

Why This Matters

Steem's economy is inflationary. Every token created, every upvote allocated continues to drive down the price of Steem inherently when there's no incoming value to match the increasing supply. When you have tokens being allocated in places like this due to illicit visibility, irresponsible auto-curation and self-voting, it hurts the overall economy. Sure, most of what @Tagalong sees is amounts of $0.02 here and $0.05 there, but when you start adding that up, what began as a small problem becomes a much larger one. In a month of activity, @Tagalong has returned $1.83 to the reward pool to be allocated to content creators who are abiding by the rules of the system and are trying to make it here on Steemit. Recent large delegations will only serve to increase that number, but we can be doing better.

The Part You're Gonna Skip

So here's what I'm asking from you.

10SP.

That's it.

Really.

See?

For many of you that's less than 5% of your overall voting power, but in the same way that $0.02 amounts start to add up to the detriment of the economy, 10SP delegations begin to add up to an amount that will help @Tagalong be more effective. I'm asking my followers and anyone who reads this post to delegate at least 10SP to @Tagalong in an attempt to increase the effectiveness and success rate of the project. If you can and are willing to delegate more, we would be even more appreciative.

If you can't or won't do that, then my next hope is that you'll help us to identify and address mis-tagged content as you come across it in the wild. I have GinaBot set up to notify me whenever someone tags @Tagalong, so a simple comment will be enough to get my attention. You can also join our Discord server and help out in the background if you'd like.

Together we can help make Steemit stronger, I believe that. All it takes is a lot of little people like you and me deciding to do something big to make a difference.

That's all I've got for you today, thanks for reading and please consider delegating 10SP to increase the effectiveness of the @Tagalong project!

Cheers,

~ Mako

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Thanks for reading!

Check out my most recent posts here:
Why I Use Steampeak (And Why You Should Too!)
Zen Coloring Contest #36 Entry

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My Current Ongoing Story:

Kayde's Tale (Part 1)
Alora's Tale (Part 2)
Kayde & Alora's Tale (Part 3)