Thoughts about the curation on the platform
There's been a lot of discussions lately about curation. Many of you might have followed @blocktrades' big post about his reasoning to how it should be changed or @themarkymark's post showing that the curation cut isn't actually 25% but more like 12%-18%.
A lot of this has of course to do with autovoters constantly front-running eachother on popular authors. When setting up autovotes they check which minutes others usually vote on the popular posts and then enter theirs a few seconds or minutes earlier to get a bigger piece of the pie. Even though there is a curation penalty it pays off since they get in earlier than the others, even though most of the rewards end up going to the author instead they make more than voting on posts that don't get may not get any votes after theirs.
It's a bad, lazy curation cycle from which the rest of the platform suffers from instead.
To many this is not news and have been aware of it for some time, on steemdb.com for instance it shows the % of the rewards users are getting, the average right now being 15% to curators of the full reward pool. This is with witnesses, commenters and interest included.
This is a big reason I have unchecked the "upvote post" box for a long time now on my own posts, I've been wanting to reward curators more than usual and I've been hoping that more authors would do the same but there are not many of them unfortunately. I find it a bit weird that not more authors do it and that curators don't act on it.
If you vote on your own post at a later stage, say at 15-30 minutes, you will reward your early voters a lot more in curation rewards. Sure you might miss some author rewards due to it, but it might get you more curators instead and you'll end up with your post being closer to the 25/75 like it is supposed to be + you'll earn curation rewards for your own post as well. It seems quite unfortunate that the SBD spike happened just now as these things were being discussed since now everyone is aiming to make as much SBD to dump on the exchanges instead of caring about what happens with the curation rewards. In a way it seems that the SBD spike should open the eyes of people that curators are now more under-rewarded than ever with authors making 10x more rewards.
Isn't 75% of the rewards enough? I know there is usually no chance of it getting to 75%, but wouldn't it be nice if it got closer to it than being 85%+ instead? It's a bit of an ethical question at the same time.
My 4 latest high rewards posts have been between 18%-23%, I was very glad to see the 23% one as it had rewarded over $100 to curators and was the closest I've gotten to 25% in a long, long time.
Some of you may also know the curation group called @ocd that I have started over 6 months ago. For a long time I've been encouraging manual curators to front-run me on those posts, sacrificing my own curation rewards so other curators can earn more. You hear a lot about curators complaining that they are making way to little and its a reason why they all collude into the popular posts trying to front-run eachother, yet almost no one seems to want to do something about it.
@tarazkp had recently leased a delegation and he has told me that he has seen an awesome increase of his curation rewards when he was experimenting voting on @ocd nominations and posts. Even my latest re-steem from a curation analyst proves that there are really good curation rewards to be made, you can read more about it here.
So my question is, what are you all waiting for? It doesn't matter if you spend only 10% of your daily voting power curating these posts or 50%, those votes will receive much higher curation rewards than usual while at the same time knowing they are going to undervalued authors and quality posts that have not been hit by autovote and bots due to them being unique.
I really encourage users to act, not just on the @ocd posts but in general look around for posts that aren't as heavily rewarded yet. I know looking through the "new" filter can be difficult but if you instead look through your favorite tags and sort them by "hot" it makes life a lot easier to find undervalued posts and even if they some times may not receive more votes after yours, you will at least have spent them in the right place and done a good curation job. If more and more people follow your mindset this place will become much richer in quality over time, benefiting both curators and the retention of new authors. @miniature-tiger mentioned in his curation analysis that out of all the authors that @ocd has so far nominated and curated, over 74% are still actively posting in the last 14 days and over 85% of them are actively voting.
If that's not encouragement enough to change your voting pattern, I don't know what it will take to do it.
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Thing is that we can not get people to think or act in the same level
hf20 will change things dramatically, will be going to 15-minute reverse auction instead of 30 and any votes in the first 15 minutes split with global reward pool rather than the author.
This will bring curation rewards far closer to 25%.
Can't wait to see how it will change things.
I am interested in how people will adjust to it and how many people are unaware of what changes.
I noticed in chat that when SBD spiked, people who had been active here for months actually didn't understand how sbd and steem operated or how the internal market works.
I think a great many will be clueless about the change. The ones that are, I think it will dramatically curve the self-voting/bot traffic in the first 15 minutes.
This site isn't that big yet and truth is that average person does not want to do anything unless it is latest fashion so places like this can easily attract ''special'' people (who are bit dummy). Of course there are also people who are just dropping their blog-posts and few who see actual value in the future by their logic.
You can include me in that :) I'm up to speed now though!
That sounds like it will make it a little more fair to the curators.
So are you saying we need to vote the 1st 15mins to get curation rewards?
I second that question. I vote when I read. I can't be on right when someone posts, and I don't want to use bots, personally. So I am being penalised for voting 7 hours later, 1 hour later? I think it should be 25% to curators, no matter when they vote. Why can't it just be that? Why does it have to be so complicated! KISS rule, Keep It Simple Stupid ;) Much love everyone. I just don't get why it'Ks so complex when it can be so simple. In my head it's simple anyway hehe
I think you put your finger right on a serious issue, which I don't see a lot of people talking about.
I don't live on the platform. I do other things. On days when it is a "writing day", most of my posts take nearly all day to put together. (I'll blame an endless love of words and the fact that I've been using a lot more illustrations for part of that.) On days when I'm not producing or just surfing, I very well may be coming to content a day or even over a week later.
Why isn't my discovery of value important or interesting to the system?
But let's say that, for whatever reason, I'm looking at my feed or Gina tells me that something has been posted which is related to my interests, I go read it, and think that it is worth rewarding. Why am I penalized for doing so soon after it's posted if it's a short piece?
The reward cycle on Steemit is a little wonky, to put it mildly.
The default state for new users is to self upvote on every post, but the common wisdom is that doing so handicaps your ability for other people to get notable curation awards.
You expend a significant opportunity cost with every upvote because you have no idea how many upvotes you might actually think things deserve over the next 24 hours. There's no way for you to know. You would have to be able to know the future – to make a good decision about whether or not to use and upvote now.
The reverse auction just pushes manual voters further out of the curve because it seems to be a system which is absolutely devoted to privileging automated systems, by both requiring tight timing and a preference for not sleeping or even ever leaving the platform.
From a game design perspective, it's kind of a mess.
Your scratch that your correct that everything could be much more simple and easier to deal with. Have upvotes go into a pool that pays out after 24 hours, with whatever split (75%/25%?) that seems reasonable to people (or is even configurable on a per post basis by the author). Have payouts be possible for any content as long as anyone is upvoting it, so that content which retains value in the future continues to reward the author. Take away the voting power decay/build structure and replace it with a settable pool of rewards by the curator, with votes essentially being shares of that pool which pays out every 24 hours.
These are the sort of architecture changes that would pull away from rewarding bots more than human intervention and interaction which engages with content. As it stands, very little of the system is about content at all.
As someone who cares about content, that's a real problem.
Exactly. Plus you mention about "deserving" and predictiing as though we should only upvote those who will make a lot of rewards from their posts. What I deem valuable and deserving is different than what someone else deems valuable and deserving. There are some who I always upvote and who almost always upvote me, but we don't always catch each other's posts.
The rewards can still pay out every 7 days, but after the first 7 days, the content can still generate rewards. Anyone new to the platform will search for tips and tutorials. Those month old, year old posts that have helped me so much in my first few months, deserved to keep generating rewards as new users upvote them. Some content never gets old.
It could be in the first 7 days, curators get rewards as well, but after the initial week, curators maybe get less and it's a show of cortesy to upvote past that date maybe. Or everything remains as is, curation and author rewards, just continuous payouts.
And yes, the whole voting power things is so confusing to me as to why it even exists. People are stingy with their votes because they don't want their voting power to go down. Whereas someone like me, votes and votes, especially on days I've dedicated to just being on Steemit. My voting power has gone down to 0 and I'm still voting to let people know that I appreciated their content. Sometimes I like to upvote a comment. If there is nothing else to add to the comment, instead of commenting back a generic type reply, I want to be able to upvote and let that person know I saw and appreciated the comment. Even if there is nothing to add, nothing to say. An upvote can say a lot. Leaving voting power high would make people want to upvote more.
I don't use bots, I kind of get why they exist, but I also don't. It could be so much simpler f there is no timer, no decrease. Just voting and rewards. Simple.
I think it's exactly the other way around; you get higher curation reward by voting after the 15 minute mark has passed. Right now the same rule applies, but with a 30 minute mark instead.
Oh ok. I thought there was still a penalty for voting way past the 30 minute marker as opposed to as soon as it hits 30 minutes. THAT I think is unfair.
No, there's no penalty at all for voting later, as long as you vote before the payout is sent. You do however get higher curation rewards if you vote before other people, so it still pays off to vote early on some posts.
Oh ok. Well, I just vote when I vote. It's good to know though. But I don't want to have to worry about when to vote. I just want to upvote ;) Thanks for letting me know.
I try to do the same thing :) I for one don't upvote stuff in order to get rewarded for it, but I can also see why some people would do that. At 100k+ SP the curation rewards are very high, so "randomly voting" can cost hundreds of dollars in lost rewards for them.
Will this mean everyone is aiming for 15 minutes, including (most) authors?
I suspect so, yes. As both parties will "lose" the reward.
Best get your Steemvoters set to 15 mins now then!
I'm assuming first come first served - should be interesting for a tool that already misses votes and votes late during 'peak' times.
For me... We must think about the development of this community. Not caring for rewards..... Because the development of this community means there are more opportunities in making friends and enjoying and earning some money.....
If we're just thinking of winning money. That means that this community will collapse.
I see peoples post all the time that are amazing but I don't have near enough power to help them out. Many of them to disappear of the steemit block chain for ever. I don't post quality content anymore because it is not worth the time. There might be a fix out there but no one has a clue yet. There are all kinds of curation teams like curie but do they really help? You have to have some attention before anyone actually takes the time to submit your post.
I would like to thank you for shedding some light on this topic.
Curation groups like curie are the main reason we have some sort of retention in authors, a lot more would've not stuck around if it wasn't for them. Distribution would be a lot more uneven.
I agree 110%, curie is a little small scaled right now to fix the entire problem though.
No negative tension meant in my last comment, it was just a question
I agree, @acidyo I've been on, here, for around a month posting in relative obscurity (despite being an established author, outside Steemit).
One post of mine was fortunate to be promoted by Curie, which encouraged me to stick around a while longer. I'm afraid I'm back to most posts being overlooked (making cents) and would be grateful if ocd might consider my poetry/prose.
Many thanks, for your attention & consideration,
Yahia
This is good information to know, I'm still trying to figure out how this whole thing works..I'll keep trying, thanks. Upvoted and resteemed, I'm sure my followers will be interested in this post.
Curation is one huge part of steemit that I need to understand better. It's integral to the infrastructure of the platform. I'll have to really dive in when I have the time.
Always appreciate the time you put into this system, Acid.
@shayne
I quit upvoting myself a long time ago, it just never felt right.
I don't like the voting bots. They should be banned
This post have some pretty interest stuff. Thanks for sharing.
great advice, this new guy thanks you and will uncheck that upvote box on my own posts. I would like to get this figured out and be at least a good curator until I find time and bravery to post more of my own content.
Your best use of time right now is to interact with content you are interested in. Figure out how to search tags and look for these authors and their posts. Meet them. Provide good feedback (and constructive criticism.) and get to know people that you will get along with.
Mix it up, between newbies, veterans and people that have 3-6 months in. This is the best way to get started.
This way you will see what makes a Great quality post(not based on it's upvotes, but style and clarity), and what makes an ugly, hard to read or poorly prepared post. This can teach you how to post better!
Good luck!
Thx
I appreciate that great advice, I am trying to do just that. There is so much here to explore and a whole new way of doing things to learn. Also..nice profile pic, he was a cool Doctor eh.