The steemit landscape is ever shifting. I wanted to write a guide for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the intricacy of the platform.
This is the second instalment, here is a link to the first.
DISCLAIMER: there might be errors in this article, do your own due diligence and verify the information.
Please hit me with any corrections that are needed.
This post draws on:
The White Paper: An incentivized, blockchain-based social media platform,
by Daniel Larimer, Ned Scott, Valentine Zavgorodnev, Benjamin Johnson, James Calfee, Michael Vandeberg Click Here
The platform is evolving. Some of the changes made can be found here:
Steem 0.8.0 Released Click Here
Steem 0.12.0 Released Click Here
Curbing unwanted behaviour
Steemit has been construct in such a way as to curb the behaviour of those trying to game the site (to manipulate the site for a quick buck), and while some may achieve this to a limited extent the platform has capacity to redress these manipulations in two ways.
1. Through the community become more informed (for example the community is actively exploring the questions of plagiarism, the use of bots, and story verification),
2. With new rules and modifications to the platform (e.g. reducing the potential rewards an individual receives when they make more than four posts in an effort to reduce the amount of trash and spam posts created).
Here are some of the more cynical strategies you might use to try get paid.
Strategy 1.
Perhaps you want to get paid by upvoting everything.
Honk - this will not work because excessive voting is limited. Your vote begins to power down in percentage terms (have less influence) and drops of a cliff after approximately 20 votes (see figure 1). The rough guideline is to upvote 20 times a day. Voting power regenerates at a fixed rate over 5 days. This rule also encourages more considered voting which benefits curation.
If you want to check your voting power go to:
www.steemd.com/ (then insert your user name here), so for me it would be www.steemd.com/@pc101. Anyone can look at anyone's account.
Figure 1. Voting power in percentage terms over time. This figure illustrates that continuous voting is heavily penalised. Intermittent voting helps to maintain voting power.
Strategy 2.
Perhaps you can make money by finding all the really successful articles and upvoting them. This way you get the curation award for backing the the winning horse.
Honk - This doesn't work. You need to back the content before it makes it big in order to receive a significant curation award. Essentially you need to find content before the whales do.
Strategy 3.
Well if it’s important to get in early I'll look for the newest post that has some potential and get in there really early upvoting it immediately.
Honk - “If you vote immediately after a post is made, then 99.94% of the curation reward will go to the author. If you vote after 15 minutes, then 50% will go to the author. Any votes made 30 minutes or later 100% will go to the curator.” In Steem 0.8.0 Released it states that this makes bot development more complex and beneficial as they must balance speed vs payout. Also “if something is trivial to curate then votes pile in early and the author benefits. If it is difficult to curate then curators make the maximum reward due to the time it takes to identify and discover the content.”
Strategy 4.
Another strategy might be to post a hundred poor quality posts a day in the hope that one of them will make it big.
Honk - To discourage people from spamming the site posting more than four posts per day will result in diminishing returns. Post edits do not count as posts.
“Each account can post up to 4 top-level posts per day before a new algorithm will kick in.“ “Top-level” refers to the post as opposed to a comment. “The bot accounts wang and cheetah [...] have not yet even created one top-level post, only comments. So they would not be affected by this.” @arhag. If you make 5 posts you reduce you potential earns to 65% of what it could have been, this 65% applies to all 5 posts, not just the fifth post (see figure 2).
In addition, posts are limited to one every 5 minutes (per account).You do not need to wait to edit a post. There are no limits on the number of comments you can make. “Comments are not affected by the posting reward rate limiting algorithm.” Comments are limited to one every 20 seconds.
Figure 2. The curve shows the drop in potential earns in percentage terms (y-axis) as the number of posts increases (x-axis). Potential earnings drop to approximately 65% after 5 posts and 45% after 6 posts.
Strategy 5.
Those with large amounts of Steem Power (SP) have greater influence to manipulate the voting system and earn themselves a sneaky quick buck.
Honk – Those with a large amount of Stem Power have money invested in the platform and want to see it succeed. Given the platform is very transparent such manipulations would damage the credibility of the site and thus damage their investment (the value of their Steem Power). Also, while investing money (power ups) are instant; it takes 2 years to withdraw an investment. Large stakeholders have a vested interest in adopting a policing role. In addition, negative voting is possible to nullify collusive groups or large stakeholders who attempt to manipulate the platforms.
This article by @theoretical is worth a look: What if people start selling their votes?
Strategy 6.
Perhaps you can make a quick buck by plagiarising someone else work or by making up a sob story.
Partial honk - The blogs that are well rewarded also receive a high amount of scrutiny. If some controversy or issues emerges regarding a post negative voting is possible.
Here is an inspiring account of a women's recovery from heroin addiction: 5 years addicted to heroin - my story told in pictures. It's really moving so upvote, upvote, upvote... O' wait, it's a plagiarised story as highlighted by @chahredine (well done @chahredine!). The post gets down voted so is not rewarded, and @chahredine's comment highlighting the fraud are upvoted and earns a substantial reward. Large stakeholders in particular have a vested interest in adopting a policing role in order to protect their investment.
Here is a good article and discussion on people allegedly milking the #introduceyourself thread. Quick Thought on Steemit Catfish by @dan: It is also an excellent post for getting a sense of how the community is working through some of the issue that emerge.
Is Steemit working?
Firstly, it is a work in progress and probably always will be. The platform expects, and even values, a degree of abuse/manipulation. Abuse has value as it highlights the holes that need to be plugged. There is some consensus that the way to receive rewards on the Steemit platform is to produce good quality posts in areas that interest you and to engaging in purposeful conversations. Trying to game the site for easy rewards is difficult and becoming more so all the time.
When developing post you should spend some time working on it, it should have some pictures, and it should have some broad appeal. The first two hours appear to be the critical window in determining if your post will get upvoted or slips off into oblivion. As such, time of day and day of week maybe important considerations. @owdy has some relevant analyse on this: Steemit analysis #2 - Understanding how to increase your exposure using Steemit data
Moving forward
An important aspect of the development process is the need to draw a distinction between
1. The efficient of the system to create an arena for behaviour to unfold.
2. How people use the system.
If users decide the content that is of most value is - a pretty white girl who likes to travel and thinks you to should be true to yourself – and if you disagree with this, this does not mean there is a problem with the algorithms or how the platform functions, it means you disagree with what the majority value. The community culture, perhaps more so than the mechanics of the platform, are still in the process of developing. To my mind this is the true value of the platform: to facilitate social exchange and cultural evolutions (as lofty as that sounds).
“I use Austrian Economics to engineer the economic incentives which make freedom and non-violence profitable.” Daniel Larimer
That is the second instalment.
In the next instalment I will look at some of the battle lines being draw on the platform and some of the challenges ahead
Here is a link to the first instalment. This provides an overview of the Steemit platform by summarising the White Paper.