RE: We Interrupt This Gaming Blog to Bring You a Steemy Hot Take
Hmmm, yes, clearly @qurator is a VERY discerning organization!
LOL
Pretty funny that my first visit over to that blog and an interview with me is the featured cover image for the Daily Qurator.
I am not 100% sure I have wrapped my head around everything they are doing. I don't think I approve but I am going to reserve final judgement. It does look to at least be better in comparison when the point of reference is a pure vote buy service like minnowbooster, but that may not be saying much.
2 SBD registration fee is a lot. That is almost $20 USD at the time of this typing. Am I getting that right? This is a requisite to use the service? And the service itself is a form of paid upvote service that just tweaks the reward payout algorithm a bit to give a little higher return to the users? Is that basically it? You mentioned that some sort of quality bar had to be passed - I am not seeing this in the @qurator posts that I have read so far - are you saying there is actually some sort of manual review process where a real human being actually reviews posts before they are upvoted by the @qurator accounts?
My general rule of thumb is that any and all forms of paying for votes are detrimental to the long term health of the platform. It is certainly possible to realize a profit from using these services, so if considered solely from the selfish standpoint of immediate short term benefit, they are great. Undoubtedly the easiest way to make money on this platform is to get a chunk of change in the form of SBD and use it strategically on bid bot services when the vote window is about to close, the numbers align and Lucifer will sprinkle the tears of angels on your post payout. From the perspective of wanting to see Steem really take off, this sort of crap stinks to high heaven and I am absolutely positive it is a huge deterrent and barrier to any kind of mainstream adoption. It makes it seem like you have to pay to earn here, and that is a death knell in my opinion.
Thank you for all your time spent sharing your perspective, here! Early adopters have a lot of clout in shaping community norms, on top of the numeric punch of high SP, so it's good to have these conversations out there.
Folks have the option of paying the @qurator entry fee in Steem rather than SBD, so that's not quite as bad as it looks. (Though it does prompt the question of why they even keep the SBD option, with a misleading 2-to-2 equivalence no less, in the current market.) The manual review happens when you apply for membership, and it's supposedly possible to get de-listed if you go off the rails after becoming a member, but I don't know how that's accomplished or how often it happens.
Pay-for-upvote services seem at least as common as upvote-for-SBD banks and lotteries, and substantially more popular/impactful; it's a feature of @minnowbooster as well, for example. On the one hand, it's similar to Steemit's built-in promotion feature, but then again, part of the purpose of Steemit promotion is to take tokens out of circulation, whereas account-based bought upvotes concentrate coin in the bot runners' hands.
Thanks for weighing in--I've got some pondering to do. Might need to divest from @qurator.
Ah thanks that makes it a lot clearer what @qurator is about. Yeah all in all I would have to say it is substantially better than the pure vote buy services e.g. minnowbooster et al. Those very clearly serve to concentrate wealth in the pockets of the whales who delegate the SP behind the vote buy service, and there is absolutely no mechanism in place to ensure that the content which is promoted in this manner is "good", or even can meet the much lower bar of "not plagiarized". It is good to hear that there is at least some sort of review process in place for the @qurator service.
I would still have to say all in all I am opposed to even more benign versions of vote selling services like @qurator though. This may be a case of me letting the perfect be the enemy of the good however; I can be a bit of an idealist at times and that doesn't always work well in the "real world". On the other hand, there is absolutely nothing to say we have to take the worst elements of the "real world" along with us as we create the Steem future we want to live and breath. Voting power is a renewable, non-depletable resource. The entire reward algorithm and "proof of brain" concept that supposedly underpins this entire endeavor is based around the assumption that votes will be given freely to reward good content. When the Steem and SBD that are paid out in rewards are funneled back to vote buy services to pay for rewards, it short circuits the intended feedback mechanism. Content is no longer visible because it is good content and has been upvoted as such - content is visible (typically) because either A: the content creator has high stake friends on platform that upvote all content produced by said creator; or B: the content creator has paid $ for upvotes. This sucks to put it bluntly. Of course there are exceptions to this but more and more this is becoming the norm. At least with a big @curie upvote both the initial curator and the eventual reviewer have spent considerable time and energy double checking that the content is both original and original to Steemit, no money was exchanged in return for the upvote, and two humans need to agree that the content is exceptional. Curie is not designed however to be a long term solution for authors - it is designed to give a boost to undiscovered authors and give them some rewards that they can turn into stake on the platform if so desired. Ultimately it takes really building up a network here, it takes really engaging and reading and commenting on other authors. It takes engaging in chat communities. In short it takes making the human connections necessary to compete with the proliferation of vote buy services. That is a lot of work, and a lot harder than just paying for votes. I understand this.
EDIT: Not as self promotion, but just as an example of an alternative to something like @qurator, I have started two curation initiatives: @r-bot and @humanbot. @r-bot upvotes "good, undervalued posts" (subjectively determined by a team of manual curators including myself) and @humanbot currently only upvotes posts that I award a Badge of Originality to but will shortly have a vote bot set up so all the 14 badge holders can call the @humanbot vote when they award their own Badge of Originality for human certified original work. Both of these accounts have curation trails set up at steemauto.com. I have secured some SP delegation with no offer of anything in return, and this helps to boost up these initiatives. A 100% r-bot vote is around $2 and a humanbot vote around $4 once the associated vote trailers come through behind the original vote.
I do not ask anything for these upvotes and basically am taking the delegated SP that I have been entrusted with and am handing out upvotes on good posts to good posters. As these accounts grow with more users following the curation trail and more manual curators upvoting posts for the services, they will reach more and more users with upvotes. To me, this is the spirit of Steem. Steem is, or should be, a gift economy.
Further reading on @humanbot and the Badge of Originality / Human Certified Original Works:
https://steemit.com/curation/@carlgnash/what-human-certified-original-works-means-to-me-a-totally-unofficial-mission-statement-from-just-one-person-in-a-decentralized
Further reading on @r-bot:
https://steemit.com/curation/@r-bot/r-bot-r-port-december-7th-2017-analysis-to-back-up-delegation-or-curation-vote-trail-on-steemauto-com
/edit
Dang I just typed a ton on your blog today LOL