We've debated the pros and cons of auto-voting a thousand times already and the conclusions to all the arguments have always come to ... [queue cave-man accent please]
"Bot voting good .... Limitations bad ...."
But since we've been on steemit a lot longer now, I'd like to bring up some serious potential issues we are having due to the rampant auto-voting of the blockchain. I know, I know, oh god she's whining again... But look. This experiment has only just begun. With all experiments it's very important that we analyse the results of certain conditions. There's bound to be problems that need addressing and I consider all and any discussions about them to be a healthy step towards progression.
What's the problem?
Bots and trails are a great way to keep our curation rewards coming in without even needing to log into steemit. We can spend our attention elsewhere and the users we follow will still get our votes as a reward for posting! We don't want them to feel like they've been forgotten and their content ignored.
It's only fair that we all get to auto-vote if whales and programmers do it. They already have a huge advantage over us and we should all be competing to spread the reward pool as far and wide as we can, even when we're sleeping.
Reality Check
Social Media thrives on the attention economy. Every social network and social media platform's success depends on their ability to keep their users engaged enough to attract investors and advertising revenue. Aside from advertisers, many of the greatest artists and content creators live to have their content appreciated by human eyes and interactions.
"Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it." ~ Matthew Crawford
Unlike steemit, most social media platforms monetise the attention of their users to pay their stakeholders - well not so unlike steemit actually! On steemit it is the users who become the stakeholders, therefore it is the users who get paid for their own attention.
But is this attention real? And if not, does it matter?
If I can give any small amount of attention to the content on steemit, then set up an upvoting automation bot for the authors I choose to support, then I haven't really monetised my attention which is what the buyer wants. Instead I monetised an automated upvote bot. Now we could argue that the buyer is the content creator we vote for and perhaps all they wanted was your vote, and they can make do with the 2 or 3 supportive comments. But in reality the buyer is still the advertiser, who in the future could help monetise the many different windows to the blockchain, e.g. steemit.com , busy.org , the esteem app and the other 100+ apps built on the blockchain. If we get paid not for our attention, but for automated upvotes instead, then what is there to incentivise us to pay more attention?
The Trending Page
Now before you imagine my whiney voice I'd like to say that the trending page has been looking miles better over the passed week or so. There are less regular authors than usual up there and the content is becoming more diverse. Maybe this is not important to you, but for me I see the trending page as an important shopping window (for non-steemians) to see how easy it is to make it on steemit! And my personal opinion is that it should look hard!
But not rigged!
That content should mostly be made up of quality content backed up by talent and maybe the odd cute kitty and steemian selfie ... jk lol. The trending page is an opportunity to tell non-steemians "any type of content can do well here, whether it makes over $100 or less than $50". Unfortunately there have been many times where you would see the same author 4 times on the trending page and when a non-steemian goes away and comes back to check out steemit again to see if it's worth trying they could see the same thing again...
I'm not here to tell anybody how to vote. I would just like people to think more about how they vote, and to consider what auto-votes incentivise authors to do. Does it encourage them to make their content better? There have been quite a few cases now where a well-known and talented author was caught plagiarising out of character. When somebody goes from posting once a day (or week) to four times daily, there's bound to be some loss in the quality of their work. So that begs another question.
What is more important for readers? Quality or Quantity?
image source
Not to say that auto-voting is irresponsible voting, but I think we can all agree that manual voting is more responsible. Lets be honest with ourselves. If being a responsible curator means seeking out content to reward and encourage for the benefit of the steemit community, then bots that vote on the same authors all the time do not do that.
Many debates on this issue have been shut down in the past on the basis that "not all bots are bad" but if we could come up with a way to make it easier for people to compete with bots without becoming bots themselves some of the biggest problems steemit is facing could be resolved!
Benefits to finding a solution
- If we could disable bot curation completely - which I'm not suggesting we do - the curators who spend time on the platform choosing content to curate manually would be the ones to gain the curation rewards. In fact, it would not be possible for a stake-holder to take a week off steemit and continue to get paid for their "time-off" just for voting for the same authors continuously, incentivising them to post as often as profitable.
- If large stake holders really did stop voting to take a break well the reward pool wouldn't change. Instead the voting power of smaller stakeholders would just increase while they haven't been voting. However, it is unlikely for that to happen with the introduction of proxy voting which offers these same stake holders the option to give their job to other steemians instead of bots.
- With the necessity to remain active on the site to curate, potential advertisers of steemit or busy won't have to see those embarrassing ratios of "200 votes with 10 views" on posts. Anybody who wants to get paid for attention will have to actually pay attention! SP could be just one way of having more influence. Authentic participation could be another.
Previously suggested solutions
@steemitblog post on rebalancing power to human users and away from bots
@l0k1 post on a possible bot voting solution
Please add more in the comments if you know of other posts about this
My suggestions...
I've had 2 different ideas on addressing these issues and one of them isn't really about bots at all but it might incentivise bot users to change their supported authors more often. As part of this post from 2 weeks ago I suggested that the ratio of curation rewards to author rewards could depend on how many followers an author has.
image source
Currently curators get 25% of the rewards from any post payout. I would consider a lower curation percentage for established authors with over 1000 followers for example, as these authors have enough community support to succeed without being auto-voted by whales. Currently the user with the most followers is @dollovigillante with 3500 followers and there are only 40 accounts with 1000+ followers. In order to create incentive for curators to seek out new talent on the platform the curators could get 50% of the rewards from an author with zero followers. This would really encourage lesser known authors who come at a disadvantage. Authors are incentivised to gain followers still, because the curation rewards take less of their post rewards and curators are incentivised to find more new authors to gain a higher percentage of the curation reward.
Now I am unsure that this would resolve the "bot-problem" completely, so I would like to encourage other suggestions. I'll be writing another post on the second idea I had but I can promise you all you are going to HATE it!!
You've Been Warned!
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