Preface
As many of you already know, I created the manual curation project called Operation Curation Delegation @ocd. Ever since I joined the platform I have been manually curating posts from all kinds of users, it started out by following newcomers and active authors of all sorts of content, nowadays I mostly follow those that post about stuff I am interested in.
After I received delegation to aid me in a more effective curation and the flow of new posts that started appearing with the increase in user-base I needed some help to spread the votes even wider and make sure as few authors as possible of quality and original content were left behind. I announced OCD over 5 months ago and today we are at 35 manual curators actively searching for content and around 150 total compilation posts of 5-10 unique authors per post nominated and supported and a bunch more that have been re-steemed.
Not only do we incentivize the curators to do a good job at finding these posts, but we also reward the authors with over 2 times the value the curators make. The purpose of the project is to keep user retention high, give authors that extra push to gain an audience and continue creating content without having to pay for votes.
The Problem
One of the problems today on the platform stands with services that provide you with voting support for a fee. This may not be a problem for everyone or something we may notice short term, but I believe it will cause more damage and affect the platforms health in the long run.
Its still a pretty fresh issue and many users are debating and discussing over it, but here are my main concerns with it.
Even though the short term benefits from buying votes might seem great (pay 1$ to receive 2$ in votes) many seem to not realize the consequences this has, such as:
- Users receiving bought votes indirectly take rewards from those that don't since we all share the same reward pool.
- Now there are middleman services that provides these offers and profit from every purchase and possible curation rewards.
- The bigger users enabling these services through delegations get paid for their votes directly instead of through the limited reward pool that offers curation rewards based on their stake.
- It makes the platform look "pay2win" which is frowned upon on most other places and according to me not what Steem is about.
The reasoning I've heard as to why these services are good:
- Smaller and new users would not make anything if they couldn't buy a boost for their posts.
- Smaller and new users wouldn't get any attention if they didn't buy votes to boost their posts to "Hot" or "Trending".
With these they seem to forget that:
On every platform, whether its Youtube, Facebook, Instagram or other similar ones users start out by doing "The Grind" as user @exyle has explained in his posts. This means that there should not be instant gratification to earn rewards or become "famous". Sure some users who already are famous might receive more attention when they first join the platform and bring along their follower-base, but those are an exception. For us regular users it should be about connecting with like-minded people, learning how to use your voting power efficiently to build a following and interact with others, etc.
Users should be able to start from scratch and use their activity and time spent on the site to start seeing rewards build up for them, not have to pay to be able to take a shortcut. It creates a sense of unfairness and not just through the distribution of rewards but also attention.
There is a way on Steemit to be able to pay for attention and that is the "Promoted" tab, which means that each time you spend some Steem Dollars to promote a post it will end up in that section and the Steem Dollars will be sent to an account that effectively burn them making it so that everyone on the platform gains from it depending on their stake, not just a few middlemen that offer the paying for votes services and those enabling them with delegations. Sure that system may not be very popular and lacking of views and attention, but we can't forget that the platform is still at its early stages and that part has not been worked on very much. A few users from the @busy team have added an extra incentive to the Promoted tab which gives you a vote if you use $D to promote your post.
There are many other consequences with these, such as users buying votes just to raise reputation for future malicious activity. Decrease in manual curation of these posts and letting authors who might not be writing that great content be able to ROI faster than the platform usually allows through the usual methods while those enabling this still profit the most. I don't want to get too deep into that as that's not what this post is about, its about trying to find other solutions to it, or at the very least something that can compete versus these services - if not through ROI then hopefully through good faith and wanting the platform and value of Steem to rise in the future.
As I said these services are pretty new to the platform, thus what I have been discussing may not be 100% accurate and represents more my thoughts and fears of how it can be abused and the damage it can do.
Our Solution
Like a few other curation projects out there, the oldest and biggest being @curie. We strive on curating new authors who write quality content and are underappreciated in general either due to being early or just because of the masses of people posting making them hard to spot. We currently have between 800-1000 unique authors we have picked up so far, although our efforts to give them a boost in rewards and attention may often have been for a single time only, we've always had it in mind to do it in a more continual fashion. This is why we are now sharing with you our ideas of the OCD-bot and what it entails.
I've been lucky to be in contact with a great developer called @pharesim who is one of the early Steemians and has put great efforts into distributing stake widely by following many manual curators with his own account. He will be taking care of the coding of the bot and making sure it flows the way it should.
How the bot will operate
We will be accepting delegations to the bot account from Steemians interested in helping out with this project and receiving all of the curation rewards back depending on the amount they have delegated.
We will start by automating 60% of the daily voting power to curate on all previous authors nominated by OCD, limiting support to a few posts per week depending on how much voting power is being used.
We will be scanning all outgoing votes and blacklist abusers from the bot support.
20% will go into the new authors we nominate daily and thus will be voted on manually. This 20% will possibly have increased curation rewards as the bot will front-run my votes if the target $20 reward per post is not met.
We will also use the bot to curate on the daily OCD compilation posts which the rewards are shared among the curators, these votes will also be front-running mine thus providing more curation rewards to the delegatees.
Possible vote scaling on a reversed busy.org format, where authors will receive bigger votes depending on the lack of followers with high SP they have.
This pre-announcement serves also as a way to discuss the effectiveness of the bot and if our community has some improvement ideas. We would love to hear them out so please feel free to voice your concerns, questions and further discussions in the comments.
As many other blockchain enthusiasts we at OCD strive for a fair distribution toward our user-base and not having the need for middlemen earning on our efforts.
Thank you for reading, we are looking forward to start and improve along the way.
