Today we publish what users have been asking for so long. Steepshot announces power delegation program.

Power delegation & curation strategy

We encourage all power delegation sponsors to participate in our initiative. The delegated power will be used to improve content curation and support Steepshot users that follow our Guidelines while posting their content.

How do we plan to distribute rewards to sponsors?

Reward	Distribution	When distributed
5% beneficiary reward from all the author rewards on Steepshot platform	Distributed among sponsors proportional to the amount of delegated Steem Power	@steepshot.pay will constantly power down and spread beneficiary rewards to sponsors every week

What's the reasoning behind this initiative?

Here's a list of issues that power delegation is aimed to solve in Steepshot.

Issue 1. Underestimated content

Some users, especially beginners, leave the network not getting enough likes despite they post very high quality content. This is not fair enough and needs to be corrected.

Issue 2. Plagiarism

Some users just post duplicated content created by others not necessarily in Steepshot. Steem has build-in downvote mechanics, but mostly those mechanics don't work in practice because, unfortunately, very few people are searching for the image on the net during curation just to double check for plagiarism. Discouraging those users by simply giving more rewards to others will increase the value of both Steem blockchain and Steepshot.

Issue 3. Spam

Some users are spamming. Just one example of this is the user that was posting hundreds of unicolored pictures per day for all existing color hex codes (like #5d34ef) somehow earning a few cents per image without anyone downvoting those images. Even though it increases the number of blockchain transactions, tolerating spam won't bring any value to Steem and Steepshot.

Fortunately, we can see a few approaches in solving those issues.

Manual curation

With this approach @steepshot and the community just browse through all the content and manually put upvotes. It does not look scalable as the amount of posts is continuously growing.

Automated upvotes

With this approach @steepshot runs a bot and upvotes everything that was posted on Steepshot. We already tried this approach and the experiment clearly showed that it is not wise to give out rewards to everyone as people start to violate the Guidelines just to get an upvote much more often.

Semi-automated process

We extract the information about the image that could be identified automatically and provide it to all the curators while also using it while making decisions for upvotes from @steepshot account with the delegated power.

What image parameters could possibly be tracked?

NSFW rate. Our team has presented NSFW Bot at SteemFest 2017 and that could be used for tracking NSFW content which is not tagged appropriately.
Plagiarism tracking inside Steepshot. IPFS hash of each image could be compared to those already uploaded through Steepshot to make sure the image is unique in Steepshot.
Plagiarism tracking outside of Steepshot. External image databases could be checked in order to find other occurrences of the image on the net. Some of the existing Steem bots are already doing that.

We have started designing a panel that will allow Steepshot community of curators to use the data of automatic monitoring of the uploaded content. That panel is going to show the level of compliance with those parameters and our Guidelines in terms of each separate criteria to simplify tracking the content that should be supported by @steepshot and the community.

Upvotes from @steepshot

We will separate upvote transactions into two parts: 1) manual curation and 2) automated upvotes.

Since at first the panel will track a limited amount of information, it will distribute a relatively small amount of upvotes automatically. With the growth of the quality of the automatic algorithm the amount of automatic transactions will grow.

The idea behind automatic curation is to ensure that all users who do not violate the rules have a chance to get noticed and have a good experience of using Steepshot.

The idea behind manual curation is that algorithms cannot track everything and curators that follow the Guidelines could often make better decisions than an automated bot.

Curation - Who receives upvotes

Priority list looks like this:

Compliance with the Guidelines
New users, as we help to boost best quality authors faster
Less than a fixed number of photos upvoted by Steepshot

We think some fixed number of upvotes from Steepshot at the beginning will be a good way to boost new accounts and users will be able to find their fans and start earning their own money on their own.
We expect that our curation rules can help Steepshot get many more Steem users on board and stay here comfortably with significant profit.

Stages

Before - After

The image on the left shows the "hot" feed, as we can often see it on a weekday. On the right, the "hot" feed, which now looks almost like this on Friday evening.

Thanks to the chosen strategy we expect that we will be able to achieve such a high quality feed rather quickly after receiving the first delegations from sponsors.

Why to delegate?

Benefits

Sponsors get unbelievable benefits.
The delegated power will help us improve the image quality in Steepshot.
Sponsors are encouraging more visual content on Steem.

Experience

Steepshot is the first visual content platform on Steem blockchain.
The developers have proved their consistency and adherence to the basics of decentralization.
At the moment, it is the only project on Steem blockchain, which is presented simultaneously on 2 platforms: a web browser and mobile devices (Android is available, iOS is being prepared for release).

Stats
Steepshot is a fast-growing Steem-based project and is used by people from over 150 countries.