The quest to squash spam and abuse here on Steemit is a never-ending one.
Without fail once we as a community have decided on the latest method of equalizing the playing field someone finds a why to exploit it for there own gain discouraging many small aspiring Steemians in the process and putting the future of the platform at risk.
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One of the biggest problems now, is the pressure people feel to post frequent short articles with how the author and curation rewards are currently set. Looking at an account like @dana-edwards she has this down to an art. Her content is usually a fairly good synopsis of an news article or mostly on the cyptospace. When she is on a roll she can get 3-4 articles out in a day of consistent quality.
Original source pixabay.com
Contrast that to my writing ability, which I am lucky to be able to post an article in a day when I have the best inspiration. Wanting to create something that will have lasting readership ability slows down the process a whole lot for me. So I feel this constant pressure to shorten my posts and keep it somewhat superficial to be able to have more to write about for the next day and save some time.
As a result of lack of visibility and a limited following, there isn't a lot of incentive for redfish and the less sociable minnows to make quality posts since most likely only 3-9 people will see it by the time that it gets published to the block for a value of $0.02. Which is really frustrating when they spent a day or two to make a post. While a whale is able to get a $100-300 simply by posting a photo without even commenting on it because they are well connected with a mature voting trail and were a early adopter. (They are now starting to actually blog again with their photos so its all good in my books. Thanks @grumpycat.)
Now for all the witnesses out there(@jerrybanfield, @good-karma, @jesta, @aggroed, etc.) I am not calling for any changes to how rewards are paid out so don't worry this is a easy one. It is just a change in how we view a certain type of comment on the platform.
My solution to increase quality content from all authors is to allow them to get paid for their work in the future simply by allowing people to over time, add a comment trail to their own posts to allow people to upvote past work that they didn't find in the first 7 days of its life.
This will allow active authors to be able to generate residual income on quality posts determined by the community with a little effort on their part.
I have made a example of what I think it should look like in the comments section below.
A couple general principles
- Self-voting in the trail should be frowned upon. This likely would be self enforcing if we create a culture of disapproval of self-voting in this way because of fear of future losses and respect for the author.
- People who want to vote an old post should request a new comment be made available. That way the author isn't constantly making useless comments clogging up the blockchain unnecessarily.
- Other people should refrain from voting on the main thread of the chain to keep it at the very bottom of the comments as the first $0.00 post.
- Voting multiple times on different comments in the upvote thread should be considered rewards abuse.
- Authors obviously need to tag the person requesting the comment box.
Benefits of this change should be obvious when applied as intended.
- Only people active on the platform will get the request comment so it will keep people who invest their time engaged even if they are sick and tired of blogging.
- There is a huge incentive for quality over quantity for people looking to the long term.
- It will drive voting even more to quality content and away from "good enough cause I don't want to waste my steem votingpower and don't have time to wade through all the superficial watered down posts in the health tag to find something I agree with." Rather you just go to one of your favorite authors and upvote a post that you didn't see.
- It will actually encourage people to go through old posts. Right now it is just the flavor of the week that gets looked at and older ones are forgotten... the blockchain is suppose to be permanent for a reason.
- For the anti-bidbot community this takes pressure off of people feeling the need to promote their posts with bidbots in order to get noticed cause they have time. Also having to scan through the comments will make the voter more aware that bidbots were used. Allowing them to decide not to vote if they are of the opinion that it is not helpful to the platform to concentrate that much wealth through automation.
- Takes pressure off of the minnow curators @minnowsupport project and @curie worried about the time crunch to find the forgotten posts to reward.
- Allows authors to know exactly what content people like... Currently if you want to reward someone for a past post you have to
So now this is where someone like @logic in the excellent team at @steamcleaners and @spaminator could pipe up with some abuse issues that they see.
The Cons.
- It would likely be harder to spot the bot farmers abusing the steemit rewards system... but there is nothing preventing them from making these chains right now so why not allow quality authors to benefit.
- Could be harder for people with a longer history to keep up with all the requests for voting comments... then don't do it, your loss.
- Its an extra thing to do when making a post.... Then don't do it.
- Hard to keep track of the posts that you already upvoted over time... If in doubt don't upvote.
- There likely are other issues that I am overlooking but I am sure someone will point it out.
I think this tweak to Steemit Culture could be just the thing to help solve many of the issues that we are currently plagued with and take Steemit to the next level.
Let me know what you think. And please, could a couple of the whales that I mentioned resteem this post so I don't have to resort to promoting it via bid bot?
The simplest solutions are often the best. I have no idea if this has ever been tried before. My apologies if it is a old idea.
Oh yeah this article took me around 6 hours to get put down and formatted while having the distraction of a cold if you were wondering.
