Splinterlands going manual curation
tl;dr @steemmonsters is switching from a DEC based promotional bot to manual curation.
HF 21/22 has been pretty effective at changing behavior on the blockchain. We're no exception. We've been using the SP on the @steemmonsters account as a bidbot to allow players to convert between steem and DEC easily and enjoy a promotional bonus to their posts.
Stakeholders wanting DEC held onto Steem, delegated to the account, and when people purchased votes the delegators would receive DEC. It was essentially an easy way to purchase DEC every day for Steem paid at market prices and have it happen automatically for Steem holders.
Concerns
A complaint has been that running a bidbot paid for by a token reduces the value of Steem by trading for DEC, that's true, but the reverse is also true that it added a use for Steem Power and a reason to hold Steem Power. Ultimately people were holding thousands of Steem to earn less than ten steem a day, which would be used to receive DEC. A generally favorable arrangement for the chain.
The current most vocal complaint is that players using the bot aren't seeing any return because a handful of whales have started indescrimately downvoting content being upvoted by the bot.
While downvoting botted content that provides no value to the ecosystem is something we continue to support we don't think that down voting all botted content is a good plan. Promotional services have a place, and where as something like "Use the promoted feature differently" has it's place, it also runs into the problem that the community can't down vote promoted posts if they don't want to see them forever.
Vote bots allow a space for open and transparent vote buying for promotion to occur. EIP allows for flagging of over rewarded content. It's a balanced system.
Personally, I'm concerned that all of this effort against voting bots will simply shift SP into self voting, circular voting, and comment farming. We'll see...
Extreme views, actions, and a new plan
The rather extreme view point of a few whales in the community is that any profitable bidbot use will destroy the apparently frail ecosystem. To discourage bidbot use at all they have begun flagging with votes that are in this case larger than the purchased vote.
We think this is not in the best interest of the community, but not enough that we would start retaliation flagging. Instead we'll go with the flow and switch to manual curation. As of 1 week from now the bid bot will cease to operate. We'll allow Splinterlands team members to upvote content with full votes from the account.
Outcomes
We hope to encourage quality posts about our game to be written and receive rewards for it. We recognize that it likely means we'll lose delegations in part because we don't like the alternative system of simply upvoting delegators and it's not enough business to justify figuring out a system of selling packs for delegations.
It's our hope that people previously delegating don't simply power down and sell, but who knows... that could be a consequence of the whales indescriminately flagging botted content.
Receiving a manually curated votes
Players can drop links into #sm-post-promotion-only as long as they are about Splinterlands. By doing so they are submitted for review and those that are accepted will be voted on. Our team will also just be voting stuff we like with our account.
I must say that this approach is inline with the new steem waive that promotes better content than any contain. I really appreciate this direction and hopefully I can bring my monsters stories to your attention.
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That's a great news for all of the @steemmonters content creator, because of the manual curation the quality contents about the game can be hear louder and that will push the content creator like me to put their best effort on making their quality contents..
I am a steem fan even though I do not really get the whole big thing on bidbots (as long as they are just break even)
but I will pull my delegation. Even though I was enjoying de DEC coming in :-)
More for manual curation I guess
Then what about @esteemapp? I think people can boost posts with ESTM tokens.
You're talking about in Discord right?
yes
Anyone else thinks that going deep into the cross dependency with Discord is super dangerous?
Sure the core team will not favor their buddies and own stuff? That would be the pattern I'd assume a human to behave like. Voting circles are a natural answer to staked SP.
I don't wanna call out people, but I've seen some very low quality and effort posts been upvoted by huge whales lately. By the very same whales who are busy with automated downvoting to their maximum extent. (One of the whales starts with O and one other too.)
Ok, I hope you might reply this. Where's the line that defines "over rewarded" content? What reference has been used to settle it (if any)? The other stuff I was wondering about, what's quality in the eyes of Splintersland team eyes?
If you're shifting to manual curation this two parameters should be published for everyone to have the same chance of creating quality content".
Good to hear.
It was great while it lasted. Thanks for the opportunity.
I think one upside we're probably not seeing, as we're too deep down the rabbithole; is how steep a learning curve bidbotting was for newcomers. Writing the post, selecting a bot, timing the payment, copy/pasting the link into the memo etc.
If they didn't do it, they were missing out on rewards, or at least felt like it.
This way, the process is far simpler.
Author a quality post.
Wait to see if others agree.
Bad idea if you ask me to give in to a couple of bully whales. How is this not going to crash the value of DEC?
One of the reasons for me to play Steemmonsters is because of the @steemmonsters upvote bot trying to survive the non-linear reward curve getting my posts to a point where people who support me are not punished for doing so.
The way I look at it, these upvotes in a way back up the price of DEC. Having 8$ upvotes means 8$x10x365 = ~30000$ on a yearly basis as a form of dividends linked to DEC which is big part of what gives it actual value. The burning of Dec will disappear while selling pressure will increase. Many people will also likely remove their delegation because of this.
I also think it's kind of not really fair that only SM content will be curated, shouldn't it be the players that get rewarded instead of only the ones that bend their way to make posts on SM just fishing for the upvotes.
Despite this decision, I still think the steemmonsters team has done an awesome job in everything they have done so far and hope all other dapps will take notes. Keep it Up!
"THIS IS FANTASTIC NEWS @aggroed / @steemmonsters ! Manual curation should be encouraged across all Platforms and Tribes including Steemit! Glad to hear it, upped 💯 and resteemed to help spread the word!" 👹👿❤👍
😳Thanks for including a place to drop links for a possible manual curation vote for all Splinterlands posts, is awesome! EXCEPT: When I tried to use it as a Tag it says to "Use only one dash" So I couldn't use it.😩
I think the Splinterlands community will love this!.gif)