A collection of random thoughts and observations as a Steemhunt Guardian and Moderator, as well as somebody interested in and “bullish” about the Internet 3.0 possibilities on the Steem blockchain.
Not for the faint-hearted readers and/or app builders.
Abuse is Rife on Steem
Not a surprise to anyone. A recurring topic in my content about Steemhunt.
None of the current abuse-tackling methods can scale to the demands of a much larger Steemosphere. There are many awesome “cleaner” projects on the Steem blockchain but too many of them rely on manual labor. For apps, and projects, it is also nigh to impossible to constantly know the newest abusers, the newest methods, and the newest accounts spewed out by bot farms.
While Steemhunt has developed an Account Based Voting system, complete with Gini-Simpson Diversity Index integration, a homemade jerk_score algo, and then some more additional factors, the creativity (and possible scale) of those who want to abuse will always be a step ahead and may often beat any possible existing solution.
This is normal. Also Google has needed years to beat poor results in its SERPs. Both years and hundreds of millions of dollars. While fighting that, a mega industry (SEO) has grown and continues to still define visibility of sites in Google’s nowadays rather clean SERPs.
Steem Cleaner Projects Should Collab and Develop
The many awesome, and absolutely needed, cleaner groups/orgs/initiatives could design a platform/API which allows projects/apps/bots to benefit the wisdom of the crowds knowledge gathered by those projects and at the same time also contribute to the ever-growing database of abusers.
Said platform could include all known, and constantly updated, blacklists. The API would return operators a rating for each Steem account posting to their platform. Each app/bot operator can decide in how far they follow said rating, respect blacklisting status, and even integrate possible whitelists of other platforms as well.
Platforms operating their own interface could then easily hide submissions by known abusers, as well as submissions/comments containing known and confirmed phishing attacks.
Steemians Still Think “Steemit Only”
Steemhunt is a trailblazing platform on Steem in the sense that it rewards contributions based on the ranking of a hunt at the end of that day’s window (Korean Standard Time).
This has resulted in Steemhunt developing its own Account Based Voting algo, an algo which gives less weight to trail upvotes, doesn’t consider bidbot upvotes, penalizes circle jerking and v4v (vote for vote). Additionally, promoting a hunt outside of Steemhunt may also result in blacklisting and being excluded from Steemhunt’s upvote for 30 days.
Obviously, this has resulted in a fair amount of grievances dissatisfactions because people have to tweak their thinking to a Steemhunt thinking, rather than a ‘we sleep in our Steemit feed’ thinking.
Which is understandable and will take time and hurt as long as Steemit is the “everything bucket”.
Yet, times will change and there will be always more platforms with such approach. Some of those, just like Steemhunt, even before the SMT platform (and Oracles) is released.
It is important to understand that not everything you’ve built and benefit on Steem(it) needs also be inherited when joining a new app on Steem. New platform... possibly new platform specific rules.
Get used to it. Deal with it. It will become always more common.
You may try but not every platform will listen to you when you try to claim that every behavior should be inherited.
Steemhunt is but the first. Yes, change sometimes hurts.
Steemhunt is NOT a Writing Curation Project
When Mayhem does what he loathes most and repeats himself.
Steemhunt is all about “the cool” of the products hunted. Not about the writing prowess of the hunter. While you may think that content quality matters, people will visit Steemhunt to find a community curated selection of “cool products” every day. Rather than visit thousands and thousands of manufacturer websites every day.
Steemhunt is a lot more than just the hunts people see and know now btw. People will visit Steemhunt for more than just the hunts, they will visit Steemhunt because Steemhunt will become a HUNT economy.
But that’s the topic for next week’s article. ;)