[Op-Ed] How curation guilds have turned voting behaviour on its head.
A few months ago, a handful of authors were voted on by whales over and over again, and bots and humans alike participated in a race to front run whales. In short, votes kept on piling over the same authors repeatedly.
Around this time, curation guilds started to form. It all started with Team Smooth, followed up by RobinHood Whale. Next came Curie and Steem Guild - operating at full capacity to this very day. Finally, we have a successful new concept in SteemTrail. The curation scene on Steemit is vastly different to what it was just three months ago.
@furion had an insightful post three months ago about how Curie even in its very early days had massively lengthened the tail. Since then the above mentioned initiatives have further cemented a more balanced distribution, now almost perfectly lining up with Zipf's law. @ontofractal has some interesting metrics that highlight this.
Of course, there are still some accounts like @steemsports and @curie which attract swarms of bots, but the days of front running whales on a select few accounts are largely gone.
Instead, bots and humans alike are focusing on something that was completely unthinkable a mere couple of months back - they are targeting new authors and posts which have earned as little as possible!
Successful botmasters like @laonie have had to improvise. We have seen Project Better - their goals are pretty simply to vote on posts which have very little rewards generated, yet some minnow votes. @biophil has an even more sophisticated bot along similar lines, seeking out new authors.
Today, these are the bots that are most successful. Because there are actually curators out there looking out for good content, and voting power support to follow up on this curation.
Of course, more bots are latching on to these more successful bots. At the end of the day, we now have exactly the same bot swarms spreading their votes across a couple of hundred different authors every day, rather than a dozen or two.
The message is clear, the message is simple. Whether you are a human curator or a bot curator - vote on good content, vote on new authors. Vote on posts that few have voted on. This is by far the most profitable way to earn curation rewards.
If you are concerned about the bots - you can beat them. Look for posts which are great, but no one has voted on them. Preferably from authors few have voted on before. The bots won't pick them up, but it is likely a curation guild will.
Very good post @liberosist. The curation guilds are evolving with each new project developed. What I would like to see continue with The SteemTrail Communities are collaboration points for those with similar interests, so new users can have a smooth transition into the network.
We are developing some pretty cool things.
That's the part that I am enthused about. I have really enjoyed seeing the engagement on the gardening posts and the foraging posts. They are natural topics for focused communities. I am really looking forward to the continued development of the SteemTrail efforts!
Yes! Vote on new authors and great content!
Nice post! I found it because I happened to be watching my bot's console at the time, and I saw the message
Curation already spent; no vote for @liberosist/op-ed-how-curation-guilds-have-turned-voting-behaviour-on-its-headYour post scored high on my bot's payout-predictor model, but then at the last minute it decided not to vote for you because you had already received too many votes.
All that to say, my vote for you was manual. :)
You should teach your bot to vote a bit earlier in such cases )
Maybe. I'm going to write a big long article about that issue if I ever have time. In some cases, it's worse to vote earlier; my bot's philosophy is "better safe than sorry."
That brings me to a possible concern. What if due to this new found focus on voting content with fewer votes; some authors receive less rewards than usual? If you hadn't caught my post manually, I wouldn't have got your vote and all the other bots that follow you. I suppose that makes sense for now, but it'll be interesting to see how things play out were there to be multiples of thousands of posts every day!
Yeah, I've thought about that too. At some point I'm going to do an in-depth study and write a big article about this, but I bet that a huge majority of votes (90% wouldn't surprise me) are currently suboptimal in some egregious way, mostly from voting too late.
In the end it will all come down to how the incentives are structured; there's no reason the incentives couldn't be redesigned to stop pushing everybody to spread their votes out.
If someone receives more, there will be someone who receives less, since the reward pool is the same.
Of course, but I'm talking about individual votes here rather than the overall network.
Yes! And great advice as well! :)
It is exciting to see what happens when we have our next massive influx of new users... I have to image the retention rate will be significantly better than it was the first time. We are infinitely better prepared this time around!
Indeed! We did lose thousands of users last time. The price soared and thousands of users joined, but were ignored, gave up and left.
Now, just need to get the influx of new users... The curation community is certainly better prepared for it this time. I do hope it's a gradual influx this time rather than a skyrocket.
we need a new word.
curation is inaccurate.
possibly we should call it processing?
How do we call curators then?
distillers perhaps? MoonShiners?
It's an intense human activity, unless you are talking about bots. Bots process.
yes...I was talking about bots.
perhaps we should have two categories...curated by humans and distilled by bots.
The bots throw a wrench in to the mix, but human curation is pretty accurate.
According to dictionary.com;
That's pretty much what a curator does on Steemit. Sift through posts, select them, upvote them, or present them to a curation guild.
processing sounds horrible for us human bots.....i pass a turing test so it should be call curating because steemit is a museum indeed. bots can process tho, im ok with that.
steem is not a museum
a museum is historical (old mostly forgotten, dead stuff)
steem is contemporary and forward looking.
oh, you mean posts on steemit are mostly forgotten and dead stuff, got it! ;-) lol
don't put words in my mouth.
I don't mean that at all.
its a joke because I DO believe steemit to be museum. :D
It is time consuming. However, I see it worthy of my time at this stage of development.
Fantastic post. I have benefited from all these projects and bots.
I'd like to mention another curation project, that I've did a presentation for on SteemFest (among our other projects that were in the presentation). It is virtually unknown outside of the Russian Steemit community.
Without further ado:
You may probably know of @rusteemitblog as a translation project for the benefit of Russian community? But a little known fact is that since the launch of Streemian @rusteemitblog started a curation guild, and has quickly occupied the #1 spot as the most followed curator.
We use a combined model that uses both a manual curation and a voting robot. And while we don't have any direct support from whales, we have aproximately 80k combined SP just with the strength of our fellow minnows. We've been lending our support to both Curie and Robinhood Whale since day one.
We are still in the testing phase, and once it is over there be an official announcement (and perhaps some nice surprises), but after some discussions with our team, we decided to write this teaser. :-D
PS. I found this post because I read everyone that I follow who also receives a vote from our trail, since I like to see where my vote power is going.
I have noticed @rusteemitblog both supporting Curie and on Streemian. Since I can't read Russian, I didn't know about your curation project. Awaiting your official announcement - hope there'll be a version in English!
Yup. And as soon as our other projects are release ready, we're going to announce them as well. :-D
It can't just be the curators though, all of us need to vote on stuff we like even if it won't earn curation rewards. We can't just vote on the same authors all the time. Have to look for new people, new styles, new fresh material.
Good recommendations, and thank you and the other people who put time and effort into the curation guilds.
This post has been ranked within the top 25 most undervalued posts in the second half of Nov 29. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $13.64 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Nov 29 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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