Politics are like surgeries or at least visiting the doctor. Sometimes you've got to have them. It could save your life or make your life a more comfortable one. But after a basic level, less is always better. Getting chopped up all the time is not a great thing. Taking pills one after the other is not a great way to live a life. But unfortunately lots and lots of politics are getting into the STEEM blockchain mainly through Steemit and Busy.
There are few topics and one of the big ones is bots. Most accusations seems like either opinions or projections of one's personal idea of what steemit should be. Notice that I didn't use the term STEEM. Why?
There is no Trending/Hot on STEEM
These tabs are just front ends. Basically they are there for the content discovery. Steemit doesn't collect your data like Fakebook or other NSA's lackeys. It uses transparent methods to help you discover content. You "Feed" is based on the people you've followed. Trending/Hot are calculated based on engagement and post age.
What is really present are the votes, the comments and resteems. One could discover content through "Feed" or individually browsing a content creator's blog. Resteems also expose content to more people and the "New"tab is mostly just useless. You could say the same about the "Promoted"tab which is supposed to be a place where new users can get more exposure with their SBD. But here is the deal: My last post got into the top few Promoted posts with just 0.1 SBD. That's just another way of saying nobody even bothers to put their money to use this feature.
To put it differently; the feature is utterly broken
We need a solid solution for this problem because minnows and even dolphins are going to loose interest in the platform when they can't get any god damn exposure. Circle jerks are going to continue and STEEM is going to be distributed among a very small group. I've talked about this here: https://steemit.com/news/@vimukthi/the-initial-token-distribution-problem-of-steem-and-dan-talking-about-steem-2-0-on-eos-telegram-q-and-a
Let's change the Promoted feature
SBD is a debt instrument. Burning SBD is a good thing IMO. Then the authors can gain bigger rewards continuously as SBD get printed in the normal rate. Although 99.99% bidding rounds for bots with $10+ upvotes end in a loss for the bidders, they only loose a small portion of their investment. I didn't run all the numbers. Most of the times I checked, the losses tend to be around 5%-10%
Since nobody is bothering with the "Promoted" tab why don't we get rid of it and allow users to burn SBD to get their posts to show a high value and get into the Trending/Hot pages. The upvote value gained through burning SBD won't be payed out to the user. It will have zero affect on the reward pool. But the users will be able to gain better visibility for their posts while getting rid of some SBD in circulation helping to keep the value of SBD higher.
Incentives - Incentives - Incentives
Why the hell should anybody use this feature???
Incentives will give them a reason. Use a significantly large multiplier for these cosmetic upvotes. X10 is a good number. Just think about spending 20 SBD and suddenly your posts shows a $200 extra value (which is purely cosmetic). No Bot is going to give results like this. You can implement this feature in many different ways. You could make Burning 1 SBD give 4 STEEM worth cosmetic upvotes. You could play with the nubers and experiment. But the basic idea is simple.
Give users cosmetic upvotes for burning SBD and allow users who don't have 10k Followers or 10K SP to have good exposure on this platform. The only difference between a cosmetic upvote and a normal upvote would be that the cosmetic upvotes won't affect the reward pool.
As for the Bots, I pretty much share what @joe.public and @lexiconical have to say about it. At the end of the day what we should be doing is trying to improve things for everybody; not pointing fingers at people or using aggressive actions that can create a poor UX for the newcomers and minnows. Just so you know, only 1907 accounts are above the Minnow level. According to the reports by @penguinpablo most days we get more than 1907 new STEEM accounts created each day.
What happens when everybody start using this feature
Some of you might be already thinking about inflation parables. Yes, many users will start burning SBD to get themselves those MASSIVE cosmetic upvotes to gain visibility. At the end things would be a lot similar to current situation at the face value. But here is the thing. You wanted to get rid of bots. this feature will get it done. Bots will become less important. We could also add "No Cosmetic Votes" tabs which doesn't consider those cosmetic votes or doesn't show these promoted posts at all.
Additionally we'll have a significant downward pressure on the debt levels allowing SBD to be continuously printed in the normal rate attracting more content creators due to better payout.
I'm no dev and I'm not even a blockchain expert. I'm a guy on this platform trying to improve things without resorting to opinion based finger pointing political methods. The code should be the law; not opinions of some random people who use bidbots to promote their posts that complain about bidbots. If we don't change this unwise course, Steemit/Busy wouldn't be much different from Feelz based SJW run hellholes. So think smart and put it into the code. Opinions should never be laws and blockchains must be governed by their code.
Happy steeming!
