The broken trending page
I think many will agree with me if I say the trending page is broken.
Over the past couple of months I have been on Steemit, what I have understood is that this platform does not have the fundamental mechanisms in place to truly promote and encourage good content.
Flaws in the meritocratic system
What was originally envisioned as a meritocratic system, where the larger the stakeholder, the bigger the influencing factor over content rewards, recognition and spread, has resulted in a broken system where merit has come to mean money or Steem Power.
The result is that this platform is no different from the capitalist and competitive systems which Steemit aims to eliminate.
Disclaimer
My above statements do not mean I don't see any value in Steemit, for if I don’t see the value here I would not be spending time and effort to get a toehold.
What I mean is that the current system of content discovery needs to improve if Steem and Steemit have to reach greater heights of quality and subsequently scale higher highs in terms of user count, content quality and market cap.
Alternate Solutions?
Much has been said about the problems of the current system where the same set of people perpetually share the trending page because they are already so high in Steem Power that it's a default for them to be there with each post while smaller Steemians with decreasing order of Steem Power find it exponentially difficult to be there. I will not elaborate on this but will rather talk about an alternate system.
A proposed and available alternative is the 1UP initiative from @flauwy.
Here I talk about a different solution which I propose to be built into the Steemit website itself.
Use resteems rather than upvotes for Trending and Hot sections
Below are some of the salient features/propositions of how this can be done.
◈ Bigger Steem holders will continue having bigger say in allocating the reward pool. This should remain unchanged as this encourages people to get and stay invested in the platform and encourages loyalty towards the future of the platform.
◈ However, the trending and hot pages should not be populated with posts getting higher cumulative upvote rewards but through a democratic selection through resteems.
◈ This will make the platform similar to how existing social media works, wherein virality is created through democratic means such that each share or retweet counts as one and not through vested power (as in the current Steem system). Newer users will find it more natural and acceptable as they will also have a say.
◈ The posts with the most number of resteems should be at the top of the trending and hot pages. Each resteem will have equal weightage irrespective of Steem Power of the resteemer. This will ensure that everyone has equal say in quality if not on rewards. This creates a balance and new users also have a say in the system.
◈ If there is an argument that higher Steem holders will have their influence decreased, that is in reality not true. Higher Steem holders will still have the power to allocate the reward, only their current ability to rule the trending page always will be to some extent curtailed as their resteem will also count as one, same as the newest plankton. They will still be able to influence it in proportion to their Steem Power, follower count and quality of curation as their higher number of followers will be more likely to resteem their posts or resteems.
◈ But since the criteria for being in the trending and hot pages will now be the number of resteems, there will be greater churn in these pages which will give a better chance for a variety of content and content creators reaching these coveted pages.
◈ This change will have to go hand in hand with encouraging more resteems by users so that users are not shy of resteeming what they find of value.
◈ This can be done by some clever design changes in the user's blog page so that resteems can be shown in a separate tab so as to not drown the user's own content with resteems. The feed page also needs tweaking with a separate tab for resteems. In the resteems feed tab, each post can come only once (with a note showing number of resteems and resteemers).
I am new to Steemit and do not have the technical know-how or the influence to make this a reality, but I wanted to start a conversation. Would love to know from others what they think about these proposals, how it can go wrong and how it can be made even better.
Would love to see a whale noticing this and starting a bigger discussion around this. I cannot say if this is the best solution, but at least this is a starting point for an important discussion towards a choice which Steemit will eventually have to make.
Any coder using @utopian-io reading this?
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