Voting is the blood that runs in the veins of Steemit. However, the current system does not encourage people to actually READ the content of the posts. I'd like to discuss with you about a proposal for a solution.
As @dantheman mentionned in his Curation Rewards and Voting Incentive post earlier :
Voting is something you can do almost as often as you like. Once you reach a certain level of Steem Power, almost every vote puts money in your pocket.
I love to upvote, and I love Steemit for the quality of the content you can find. From the beautiful pictures in the photography challenge to articles helping me better understanding the blockchain and the alt-currencies, Steemit is a fantastic place to learn.
Today, no other Internet site comes as close in terms of content quality.
Unfortunately, I think that the site does not encourage us to actually READ most of the content we vote for.
On top of that, getting curation rewards, even as low as a minnow's rewards, can lead us to the use of gambling strategies to maximize our revenues:
The UPVOTE-GAMBLING, which consists in scrolling the "new" or "active" page and upvote posts we think will yield revenues:
- posts with already a bit or revenues around the 20-30min mark
- and/or whom author has a great reputation score
- and/or posts with clickbait titles or photos
Doing this, we often do not even READ the posts we vote for.
To limit such behavior, and try to incentive users to READ the content, I propose the following:
- Limit the upvote-power (hence the potential curation reward) by 50% when a post is upvoted in thumbnail mode.
- Only when the post is "open" the full potential of the upvote is applied when clicking on the button.
Even if some users will open the post and scroll down to get the "full-upvote", it can still make them read the beginning of a story, and maybe lead them to read the entire story, at list a few pieces. That's a good start.
On top of this, this will give an advantage to advanced curating bots, which @datheman believe are the future of Steemit:
Most existing robots (except cheetah) do not look at the content, but instead attempt to guess on what other robots and voters will do. There is some risk that the game could evolve in such a way that content is ignored completely as bots up vote based upon what other bots do.
Such bots would have to read (parse) the full content of the post in order to be able to use their "full-upvote".
For the record, @brunopro wrote a great post 2 weeks ago about the rise of bots. Read it if you have 5minutes, it's interesting.
And I love one of the last sentences, which I will conclude with.
(message from the content creator (ME): if you reached this far in the text, congratulation to you! you rock because you're really using the platform and reading content! thanks and remember to upvote if you like my stuff!)
EDIT: The post triggered some very interesting comments, like the one of @mark-waser below.
As @brunopro also pushes for, @mark-waser 's proposal is simply to REMOVE the upvote button in the newsfeed.
Users would have to get into the posts to be able to upvote.
It's a bold move and it does have advantages:
- it will have a strong and immediate impact on the reading behavior.
- implementation would be extremely simple from a developer's point of view.
If I like the concept, my only fear a this stage would be regarding the liquidity of the STEEM currency, especially if you ask whales to read every post.
me if you enjoyed this post. I am happy to discuss this proposal in the comments section.