This is the second monthly report describing updates, changes, and other news with regards to the Q-Filter voting bot, vote lottery, and web application. In this update, we'll cover the some of the adjustments made to the prior roadmap and changes in overall priority.
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Progress Report
Vote Lottery
Instead of a monthly payout scheme based on platform participation, a vote lottery was implemented in its place. This allows for payouts to fewer individuals and preventing the q-filter bot from spamming the network on a single day and grants a single payment per post to the best voter. The best voter as mentioned in earlier posts is determined by a combination of voting value and random noise. This makes the system bot-resistant (although one can still develop bots that work probabilistically, but this is much harder).
Q-Filter Bot
The bot remains unchanged, but issues were reported where the bot flagged individuals who in turn did not receive flags, but due to small percentage whale votes that added enough variance to penalize posts into a range where the bot conceived the post as garbage when it was not. Thus, a check was implemented to simply prevent the bot from flagging when no flags were present. But this still leaves potential users without a vote by the bot. So, a future fix will made soon as described in the roadmap below.
Web Application
There were few changes to the web application during the period that are really worth noting. Just a few cosmetic things were adjusted. There are still obvious bugs in the visual interface, but the visual interface is not a priority as users can easily see q-filter posts on Steemit and the volume is still low. But continued improvement is planned in order to improve the application so it is stable to use and view the different filters in action reliably.
Roadmap
Q-Filter Bot & Vote Lottery
In order to fix the issues with small percentage whale votes mentioned above, Q-Filter is moving away from a stake-based measure to a participation-based model. However, we will be using a updated model that uses an adjustable weight model that is bounded rather than having unbounded score. The no flag update described above will still be carried over but regular users should not experience this issue. The vote lottery will also move to a participatory system.
New Participant Model
Rather than grant arbitrary points to users, we will treat the whole ecosystem as a continually adjusting weight network that gives weight to regular users. Those that use Q-Filter more will have more say in the ecosystem. Thus, whales skewing the score will no longer be an issue as it requires constant work in order to maintain a high weight.
This is achieved by capping the total network weight to (1000 * number of Q-Filter participants). Each account that is seen for the first time is granted a weight of 1000 and the weight is adjusted by behavior and participation. Inactive users will lose weight over time, while the inverse happens to active users. This is achieved by adding point to active participants per post and then normalizing the network weights afterward to keep the total network weight bounded.
However, one could argue that spamming of the Q-Filter system is now incentivized with this update. We go over two cases below and describe why that is not so much of an issue:
Case 1: Vote Spamming: This is arguably not an issue. Authors will gain more rewards due to bot participation and without a really sophisticated bot, such bots will not be able to win the vote lottery regularly. Although regular voting is rewarded, this reward is split among voters, thus the only way to significantly gain weight in the network is to win the vote lottery regularly.
Case 2: Post Spamming: This is a potential issue if ignored. But there are incentives to flagging such content. First, one will still gain weight in the network by voting. Second, if the post is truly garbage, the vote lottery winner is more likely to be awarded to those that flag the spam as there is a variance based penalty. Third, those who are more active in the system have the most power. So, policing is significantly easier.
Also low-rated posts will contribute negative weight to the user and users with negative weight overall will be unable to post to the Q-Filter system (They'll still be able to use the tag). Users can regain positive weight again by voting for their peers. Being selfless (via voting) is rewarded in the system with greater weight.
Interface
But why care about having a higher weight if one is not rewarded directly by having a higher weight? First off you have indirect incentives. You have more influence over the scores of different posts which determines which posts and how much they get upvoted by the Q-Filter bot. This score also effects the vote lottery.
But the ultimately goal of these scores is to sort content by a means beyond simply amount of money earned. Because such systems tend to reward promoters and users that are already large and don't need help. By creating a better filter, we hope to better uncover those hidden gems you've been spending so much time on. And hopefully in due time, you will be able to capitalize on this more meritocratic attention.
Updates Schedule
The new participant based system will be implemented in 48 hours from the posting of this article. This allows current users to still receive upvotes from the bot based on the old rules. This also serves as a heads up to other users planning to prepare content for the system that changes are coming. Unfortunately for those who have gained points in the old system, those will be phased out. But they were unattached to any current rewards scheme, so there is no real loss there.
If there are any questions or concerns about the update scheduled for 8PM EST on 2/17, feel free to ask. You will either receive a response from this account or my regular account @greer184. If you want more detailed or technical explanations of the inner workings, I'll be happy to go over those as well.