RE: We Interrupt This Gaming Blog to Bring You a Steemy Hot Take
I think you have it mostly correct, from my vantage point as a "high powered curator" LOL
I would maybe add a little nuance to your understanding of one point, RE votes coming through without views. Curators and curation organizations (e.g. @curie) can and do set up "curation trails" on websites like streemian and steemauto. These websites allow other users to "trail" their votes behind the curator's vote. This adds to the curation reward the original curator receives, so it is an easy way to both support quality content (trusting that the curator / curation organization is a good judge of what that is) and also support the curator. Many if not most of the upvotes that hit your post came along with the @curie vote as part of the curation vote trail.
I personally do not think there is anything wrong in the slightest with receiving upvotes with no accompanying views. Of course, as a content creator, you would prefer BOTH upvotes AND views. That being said, there are many, many people who have an investment in STEEM in the form of an account here with Steem Power, but who do not have the time to manually curate and read posts and upvote good content. It makes perfectly good sense in this case to set your vote to follow behind someone who you think is a good judge of content - the alternative being to either just let the account sit there (which does nobody any good) or possibly to delegate out the steem power to someone else but that does not yield any return on the investment at all. This way at least they are getting a little curation reward back on their investment, and their Steem power is being put to good use. Surely you would rather have had those extra votes come along, even with no views, than to not have received them?
RE whatever you are talking as far as upvoting @minnow.helper and @lucky.steemian - it sounds like you have made the right choice. Whoever recommended that you use these services may not be the best person to talk to about what to do on this platform :) Just from the tiny bit I can infer about what those accounts do from what you said, I can already tell they are terrible! I do not recommend any form of paying for upvotes, or in this case, upvoting for upvotes. And yeah, we definitely need more people upvoting good content instead of just engaging in circle jerk behavior.
If you are interested in curation I have a public channel for aspiring @curie curators to impress me with your curation ability. Check out my @humanbot blog and look for the latest "Curator Incubator" post if you are so inclined.
I love your posting - keep it up. Cheers - Carl
Hey there! Thanks for stopping by again and for leaving such an in-depth comment!
I did learn about vote trailing sometime in between this post and today. Lo and behold, Streemian and Streemauto are the "tools... to automate this process" I hypothesized! I think it's a matter of shifting my mindset from the role of upvotes (likes/+1s/etc.) on other platforms. Elsewhere, an upvote means "I appreciated or agreed with this post"; here, it can mean that, but it can also be simply "This post is a worthy investment of voting power." (Can you tell I'm new to cryptocurrency too? I swear, the crypto version of the old hammer-and-nail adage is "When all you have is a blockchain, everything looks like a speculative investment vehicle.") And that's probably fine, for the reasons you outline. It just means I need to temper my ego with respect to upvotes. "No, Sabe, 75 people did not enjoy your fic. A few people enjoyed your fic, and a bunch more said 'yeah, I'm with him' and/or thought your fic had earnings growth potential. Welcome to capitalism!"
As for the upvote bots, my rubric since this post has been "Is voting power being used to promote and invest in actual content, or is it merely harvesting the reward pool to redistribute?" That rules out the stuff that @minnow.helper, @lucky.steemian, @fogel etc. are doing, for sure. But e.g. @qurator and @qustodian, which were also part of my onboarding, are a bit grey with respect to that--they do automated upvotes, but in order to gain access to them you have to establish a certain baseline of content quality. What's your take on those?
Aaaaand... I just noticed it was @qurator bigshots, not @curie members, I spotted resteeming upvote lotteries. Shoot. I would correct that in my post, but it's already off the edit cliff. Please convey my apologies to @curie for accidentally besmirching the org's name. >_< Maybe I should toss out a quick payout-declined correction post?
I've only dipped my toes into curation, thus far, as the content production side is demanding most of my time available for such things--but I will definitely follow @humanbot and learn more of what I should be thinking about for future!
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
Yeah upvoting can definitely mean more things here and it took me a while to wrap my head around it. Thanks for clearing that up RE Curie members resteeming upvote lotteries - I didn't mention it in my comment as there are a LOT (hundreds) of Curie "members" when including all curators and reviewers, and Curie does not attempt to police the behavior of its members. That being said, I don't personally know of any Curie member who supports that sort of thing. I have to be honest and say I have absolutely no idea what @qurator and @qustodian do and will have to research a bit before I venture an opinion. Cheers - Carl