RE: Compact Broadcast Node: Low Cost Infrastructure to support Keychain, Splinterlands, Steem Engine and Future Apps
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I'm just trying to get it seen on trending. I stopped buying so it would be 4th or something. Many of my posts these days earn $6. Just don't think it's terribly likely to get the eyeballs I'm hoping for without promotion and I don't think promotion is bad a thing even post EIP. I think this post and this work is a really nice addition to the ecosystem.
That said I also expect a few flags. It'll be ok either way.
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I disagree about eyeballs. You have followers who would upvote (including me) since yes it is a good initiative, and things have changed a lot on trending itself. The barrier to trending is a lot lower (and the fewer bought votes are used the better it will get).
Agreed and flagged by a minnow
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Hey smooth, witch-hunting people that promote their posts is not going to be as effective as it may seem, a decrease in bot promoted posts is not going to bring the masses to Steem, that in itself is not a value proposition. It may actually serve to alienate more people, however If the content that was promoted is trash then that is a different story.
I agree on the non-necessity of downvoting posts simply because they've been botted. Promotion is a perfectly valid use case for bid bots. In fact, it is the original use case and it is meant to increase demand for Steem Power. Excessive use of bid bots or to just maximize ROI, the byproduct of which is the pushing of unworthy posts into Trending is grounds for relentless downvoting. But this particular post contains valuable information to those people who are not @aggroed's followers, too.
In practice there are only a few slots per day on the top of trending, maybe 5-10. Yeah everyone thinks their post is the best thing since sliced bread, but if other organic curators and stakeholders aren't voting for it, there is objectively a reason to be skeptical. So just having some "valuable information" is not enough.
I also think it is a valid use, but I find it hilarious that those who have been providing blind upvotes in exchange for money are suddenly against blind downvotes.
If they don't like it they should "counter" the votes, that's been their message to the community for 2+ years.
They should take the lumps and brainstorm ways to make their businesses less destructive to the community and content creators.
I have say that I have changed my opinion after having listened to arguments for downvoting bid botted content in Trending. Boosting posts to Trending should always happen at a financial loss. Paying people for putting stuff into Trending is madness because it leads to the prime real estate on Steem being filled with garbage. Trending should have the best organically supported content on Steem to draw eyeballs, which is when advertisers would actually want to pay to put their ads in there.
I think it was @nonameslefttouse put it perfectly:
https://steemit.com/life/@nonameslefttouse/the-state-of-the-nonameslefttouse-address-another-month-down-with-some-time-off-in-between-for-thinking-purposes
Don't agree with the "witch-hunting" name calling ;)
Promoting is fine. But the amount of the reward pool used for doing so still matters. People can find ways and places to do so that don't engender opposition from people such as myself who understand the systemic problems which can be caused by too much promotion.
Trending is a scarce resource. The posts cycle maybe every 12-24 hours in most cases, which means there are maybe 5-10 slots per day at most (depending on screen size and UI of the viewer, but obviously higher is better). People can take a step back and be a bit circumspect about whether their content is not only useful, but really one of the 5-10 most worthy of exposure on a given day out of every single post on the entire platform. I would submit in many cases the answer is no, especially if other stakehodlers don't agree with the merit enough to give organic votes.
Finally, too much promotion undermines what we are trying to do with encouraging people to invest in curatation initiatives. Not only does it reduce the reward pool (for both curators and authors) but it makes curation less effective and meaningful. Do you honestly believe that every one of those 5-10 daily slots should be filled by promotion, leaving none to be filled by honest curation? My second question would be how many posts would you say are currently being heavily promoted daily and is this a healthy balance? I don't think so, not yet. So some push-back is healthy.
So, no, I'm not flatly against promotion, in specific special cases where the promotion is exceptionally needed and useful, but it can easily be, and has been, drastically overused. Until that is no longer the case (or it becomes clear that EIP did not work and the dominance of paid voting and self-voting will remain the norm), I plan to continue applying some downvotes to encourage change.
#NewSteem on, mate!
My take is there is not much demand for the trending real estate, I've seen days go by without much new stuff on trending. If new content wants to appear in that real estate space then it will have to outbid what is there, which is healthy, creates a demand for SP or demand for Steem to purchase votes. I do agree with you that we don't want every post on trending, certainly not in the top slots, if promoters ensure their post is just off the trending page but high enough for them to still get their message across then that is great, perhaps this post was overpromoted. Promoting is good for a kickstart to get visibility and then be pushed up further by curation consensus. Promoting yourself to #1 takes away an opportunity to discover what organic votes your content might get and thus a valuable opportunity to gain user metrics and sentiment is lost by overzealous promotion.
Everything in moderation is fine, I don't agree with-over promoting myself, but I do feel promoting in general is more liberating than a case where users would have to beg and plead whales in multiple private DM's to let their content have a voice.
If there were no demand then sincere and success-minded Steemians such as yourself and @aggroed wouldn't be redirecting the reward pool simply for the purposes of visiblity!
The time it takes for Trending to refresh is a function of both the parameter of the algorithm (which is why Hot refreshes faster), as well as the amount of votes, largely paid votes, piled onto the posts. With less paid votes being misused for this purpose, it will cycle faster.
But to the extent it doesn't cycle that fast, it means there are even fewer slots. Now you have to argue that one's content being pushed up there is among the most worthy 3-4 posts on the entire platform in a day (or top 5-10 for the first couple of pages). Occasionally, this may be true. Often it is not.
We will have to simply agree to disagree. Paid voting is not healthy for Steem. It undermines curation and the value of Steem as a mechanism to give rewards to worthy contributions.
As I said, we agree there is a role for some promotion, but treating the biggest reward payouts as being a matter of "outbidding" is unhealthy.
We didn't double curation and introduce free downvores for no reason (and further introduce a non-linear curve which has a heavy cost on smaller reward-earners and communities, but necessary in order for EIP to have a chance to work). That would all be completely unnecessary if we were happy with the paid voting model and 'outbidding'. We did it specially to shift the emphasis away from vote selling and toward curation.
The dichotamy of vote selling vs. begging is a false one. I would suggest that you redirect your considerable entrepreneurial skills away from pure vote selling and toward creating vehicles for people to get their content in front of curators and vehicles for promotion that don't also involve redirecting rewards in an unintended and unhealthy manner (for example, perhaps we could have an ad-network where people can pay for visiblity across Steem-related UIs, just a quick brainstorm).
We actually have planned to add advertising to Ginabot notifications where people can purchase ad slots which come in after x notifications, Ginabot has 8000+ registered users.
The problem is actually vote apathy, you can put out all the great tools you like but if whales have busy work lives they won’t use them, i think there were some curation centric websites that for the life of me I cannot remember the name, but likely never used. Whales are few on Steem and not enough to cater for the demands of a growing userbase, there are lots of active minnows but their votes aren’t worth much, even cumulatively, the distribution on steem is not great so curation defacto won’t be great.
I also caution against heavy downvoting and reducing trending values drastically, people came to steem in their droves when trending posts were $1000 plus, with the hopium that they would get a fraction of that, right now with the highest cream of the crop being $150 let’s say, new users won’t even stand a chance to get anywhere near, post promotion at least puts new users on equal footing with insiders and people who know the system, the power to get visibility is in the hands of the user which is what crypto is about, empowering those without a voice, not subjecting them to an oligarchy that determines according to their own bias whether your voice is worth something or not.
The other narrative I subscribe to is that Steem is no longer a one-trick-pony as it was in year one, authorship and curation is not the only use case, we have games like SM and nextcolony, steem can be used as a stateful backup of your wordpress data and gamestates too, we have forums that use the rewards model as tipping rather than for visibility etc.
The Steem community should be focussing on efforts to rather build business grade wallets, easy multisig, hardware wallet compatibility, merchant integration, debit card integration, gift cards, referrals/affiliate programs etc. Focussing on downvoting to me is a race to the bottom by alienating people that could later have been buidlers and by making steem look mediocre with lower post values on trending.
Edit: There has been some user sentiment discussion in slack where it seems users don’t want their content value to be determined by the “rich people”, that is quite archaic if u think about it. I think Steem should try push in the direction of Proof of Human and individuals having equal weight in voting content and number of human votes determine value and visibility, if we can solve that problem while still keeping identities self-sovereign then steem would have solved that which giants like twitter cannot and would once again put us at the forefront of innovation.
The way to get (some) higher values is with less promotion. Let the occasional exceptional post get voted highly by the stakeholders. The more that is spread out by a lot of people buying promotion every day and the more the total pool is drained by people buying promotion every day, the less an exceptional post will be able to earn even if it does get exceptional support.
All of the other stuff you mentioned about multisig wallets, theoretical proof-of-human models, etc. its all great but has nothing to do with voting on the reward pool. I'm all in favor of Steem not being a one-trick pony (which is why I'm totally in support of applications like Steem Monsters which don't rely on the reward pool at all, will be in favor of strong SPS proposals to work on multisig and such, etc.), and I would add to that promotion models other than using rewards (including some of the ones you mentioned), but as long as the reward pool does exist, and is a signature feature, we should also make the most of it, not abuse it for promotion.
Whales with busy lives can delegate to curators instead of vote-selling.
Or just not vote, which distributes influence to those with less busy lives. The less prevalent it is for everyone to monetize their votes, the less critical it becomes to monetize all of yours in order to keep up. Just being a passive investor relying on Steem price appreciation is a lot more viable. Which is a good thing because for most of the world of investors out there we want to attract, that's what they want, not needing to participate in some convoluted scheme involving vote selling.
I'd like to chime in and add that the curangel announcement reached 3rd trending before it was featured by steemit solely through organic votes. By coincidence I added one with ~380k stake that was delegated to the project right after that (I didn't expect it to return to me in that moment, perfect timing), but I doubt it would've been necessary for that to happen. If you have some followers and a post that people really see as valuable, there is no need for promotion at all.
Thanks for your tireless engagement smooth!
Good input!
Atm the 'NEW' section is not very busy, content creation has dropped alot so it is easier for good content to be seen and upvoted by the few people we have active with any decent stake, if/when Steem becomes busy again alot of authors are going to fall through the cracks, post promotion helps them get visibility above the rest. Another idea is burning SBD or Steem to get a featured slot on Steemit.com or some trending page ranking.
You seem desperate to justify your business model as something useful, which it simply is not.
Earlier you said whales are too busy with other things, now they're suddenly scrolling "new". Both is wrong. Trending topics happen through word of mouth. Nothing goes viral by itself, it happens because people talk about it on multiple channels.
A lot of things fall through the cracks. That's how it is on the internet. To become successful, you need to build an audience and have that show your work to others. You can write the most hilarious tweet or produce the most awesome youtube video, if you didn't build a follower base to get into a network it will never be seen by anyone.
"Promotion" (buying votes) on steem was an abnormality, which let those who were willing to pay you guys the most money block the real trending topics. Without the downvote efforts of smooth and others, my post would have never had a chance to even make it to the first page of trending, as the votes it received would've been worth less, and the barrier to get up there would have been higher. You killed off the real trending.
There is an option to burn SBD to get a featured slot in the promoted section. Guess why nobody looks at it? For the same reason everybody kept saying "I don't look at trending" over the last years. Nobody wants to see shit which gets shoved into their face. The argument of providing visibility is a marketing slogan, nothing else. It might work if the interface put an occasional promoted post between organic content, but the way it was only helped you (and delegators, which includes me after I gave up and supported ocdb as "the lesser evil" eventually) to make a lot and the buyers to make a little more steem.
I would argue that tagging is still essential. Steem does not allow for much discovery without tagging potentially interested people. It can be annoying, but right now its that or some other annoying technique to gain community awareness.
No idea, I don't tag and I certainly don't react to being tagged. I may have a look at it when I'm bored and check Steemworld for mentions, but I don't vote then because I don't want to encourage that behavior.
Just added to my last comment
'Trending' literally means 'being the subject of a trend'. Trends involve multiple people supporting / doing something. If you put posts into the trending section yourself through payment, you are denying the real function of Trending. Vote buying, in that sense, to reach 'trending', is like designing a new hat and then paying people to wear it.. then saying that your hats are important.
That is assuming that trending is 100% efficient in terms of wisdom of the crowd and whales aren't already voting their friends or self-voting their alt accounts to get to trending. In an ideal world the trending page should be as you describe it, but in reality bots give the average user a fighting chance to get noticed.
Also see below my reply to @hobo.media
There's not much demand because trending is entirely filled with other advertisements and garbage that get paid to be promoted as well
The more you bid, the greater your exposure and the more money you're up in total after your post pays out. On the other end vote sellers can expect returns in line with full self voting. Think about it, is this sustainable for a healthy content discovery and rewards based proof of brain system?
The value of trending depends on the quality of content on Steem. As the quality of content on Steem improves people will flock to Steem, and the Steem ecosystem will raise in ranking and awareness online. This in turn improves the value of getting on trending.
Bot services provide an immediate use case for STEEM/SP, this is true. But focusing on Steem being a place for high quality information sharing is a long-term focus, which the bot services can, and arguably have already stifled.
Human curation programs are the ideal way to move forward. This can create jobs for real people, more than just curator jobs too. If quality becomes evidently more important than quantity, people may hire and compensate professional writers, editors, translators, artists and musicians to improve the quality of their content, and they might begin using STEEM directly for those services.
I don't agree that quality content is going to be a silver bullet to bring the masses, I think somewhere along the way Steemians got brainwashed by that, in reality if I put up a website and put up the best content earth, yet did not market it or have affiliate programs, pay influencers to push my website, hire marketing agencies, have good onboarding funnels etc, I can have all the good content I want but it will never be a successful website.
It takes more than just quality content to make a website successful and become a household name, usability is also another factor, this mindless drive to get good quality on the page is unlikely to help the Steem price, if we get Pewdie Pie or Lady Gaga (the real people) on the front page, now that sells!
Also who is to say that content being promoted is not quality, I too am against promotion of rubbish quality, but if it is not rubbish then I don't have a problem with it being promoted with realistic values that are not over the top, it also stimulates activity on Steem, where there is currently not many value propositions.
The general consensus for using promotion services now is to decline rewards. Bot services are not quality oriented at all, they upvote what they are paid to upvote.
There are better ways, such as the new Curangel project, and the HoboDAO project that we're building is a decentralized contest curation system that allows a group of human curators to decide the top 5 daily posts submitted to the HoboDAO for review and curation rewards.
Contests and human curation services are ultimately a lot better of a system. However, if the bot services wish to continue, the community is recognizing that it is acceptable if rewards are declined. Ideally, #NewSteem should just embrace new human curation programs and give up on the idea of bot services, which is a point many outside commentators have criticized Steem for having.
I think setting @null as beneficiary to burn a portion of the promotion rewards is also an interesting idea, in such a case since burning is involved maybe a 50% burn would be acceptable.
Everyone that ever made a post here would have liked their post to be seen on trending. When you make that call yourself for yourself beyond your stake you reduce the chance of others to get there organically, you break proof of brain and you drain the reward pool.
You should know better as a witness.
Downvoted.
Maybe steem needs special reward pool + special trending page only for witnesses, so we can peacefully shake hands and do our thing