Towards a voting service that supports legitimate content creation

I've been giving some thought to the post, What if paid voting services provided truly passive ROI for their clients? Would this be an improvement for the ecosystem?.

In that post, the idea was just to reduce the amount of low-value content that appears on the trending page while providing the same functionality as existing voting services. My thinking was just that free-riders are gonna ride for free, and there's not much that most of us can do about that, but at least we can provide more visibility to legitimate content creators.

Now, however, I'm wondering if we can harness the concept in order to provide a voting service that actually boosts legitimate creators above the noise - instead of just hiding the noise. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with paid voting services - the problem we have is just that they're being deployed in a way that tends to destroy the blockchain's value as a social media platform.

I have thought - for years - that the solution to the current generation of voting service that harnesses value from investors and destroys value from the attention economy is a new generation of voting service that harnesses value from investors and also from the attention economy.

In last year's post, when I imagined what a 5^th generation voting bot would look like, the first criteria was "Large passive rewards for investors." I also imagined the harnessing of beneficiary rewards. In theory, the passive reward problem was solved in last week's post.

So, with an eye towards developing an Open Source proof of concept of a gen-5 voting service, let's take a look at a potential voting service implementation that actually brings in value from the attention economy, instead of destroying it...

Who

All delegators who stay off of an exclusion list would receive daily rewards. Ideally, a delegator would also be able to direct some/all rewards to a different author account, in a patronage style relationship.

Monthly subscription fees and/or white lists could also be included.

The exclusion list would be actively maintained in order to weed out accounts that exhibit abusive behavior.

What

Daily rewards would be delivered by way of votes on eligible posts by the delegator (or their designee) or by voting on automated comments with the appropriate beneficiaries set.

Where

• If a delegator (or their designee) has any unvoted posts/comments in the voting window, the upvote would go on the currently unvoted post with the highest engagement score.
• If not, the voting service would create a comment that's designed to be "low visibility" and then vote on the comment. That comment would use beneficiary rewards to direct rewards to the delegator (or their designee).

When

• The delegator (or their designee) would receive one or more daily votes, either on their own post or by way of beneficiary rewards.
• For any post or comment, the voting window would begin when it's (for example) 2 or 3 days old and end at 6 ¹/₂ days. This time window allows time for measuring engagement.

Why?

Vote size would be adjusted based upon 3 factors:

• Delegation size
• Engagement scoring on the specific posts (if applicable. Examples: 1, 2)
• Some sort of follower network strength score.

Brief Discussion

Now, let's look at all of the criteria that I set down for a gen-5 voting service in last year's post:

What would a generation 5 voting bot look like?

Off the top of my head, here are some of the characteristics that we'd like to see:

• Large passive rewards for investors
• Protects and increases the value of the investor's stake
• Encourages creation of interesting content
• Rewards authors who deliver an audience (i.e. impressions, views)
• Does not require, or even encourage, daily posting of vacuous content

How many of those are met in the current proposal?

Criteria	Met?	Met in Gen 4?
Large passive rewards for investors	Yes	Some
Protects and increases the value of the investor's stake	Yes (hopefully)	No
Encourages creation of interesting content	Yes (hopefully)	No
Rewards authors who deliver an audience (i.e. impressions, views)	Yes	No
Does not require, or even encourage, daily posting of vacuous content	Yes (hopefully)	No

The biggest challenge I can imagine right now is this:

• Why would authors with low scores for follower network strength and/or engagement make use of this service, if their higher scoring peers are getting a larger share of rewards?

And the best answers I'm imagining are that (1) it delivers passive rewards, so it frees them from the daily posting requirements; (2) the reward mix would have to be tuned to maintain the right client balance; (3) the long gap between posting time and voting time would attract other voters who were chasing curation rewards, so it might help authors to grow their audience; and (4) over time it would evolve towards a steadily improving pool of authors.

I'm currently blocked from doing much development in my personal time, but in about 5-11 weeks, I think I might actually take a stab at this. It feels like a rough python prototype could be built in a few weekends.

I think it's important that it be an Open Source project in order to fully harness decentralization and competitive forces.

Feedback from Brave Leo (Claude 3 Haiku)

Overall, the author seems to have a well-thought-out plan to address the shortcomings of existing voting services and create a system that better aligns incentives for both investors and content creators. The key will be in the implementation details and fine-tuning the reward mechanisms to make it attractive to all participants.

Thoughts?

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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^{Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.}

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