Humans required
A project to stand ground for the original idea of human interaction on the hive blockchain. Proof of Brain. Its ideals are based on non-automated decisions to reward quality content. This is the place where both the best and the good authors can thrive, while actually receiving many more comments from their readers than usual, thanks to the emphasis on doing everything manually.
Lately, people are talking about allowing automation to a certain degree. Despite how this is obviously against POB's ideals, this conversation exists, because larger stakeholders simply want to meet their ROI. However, it's obvious this would harm the project in the long-term. Forcing the tribe's administration into accepting anti-proof-of-brain standards leads to loopholes that can and will be explored, denying most of POB's value in the future.
The road of cutting corners
Would you buy into a project that has already shown everyone how its values can be bent? Maybe only for the short term or for speculation in general, and you'd certainly not do it because you believe in that project.
You might also think it wouldn't show, but the whole curation leaders thing will pick up soon. People in this position will start responding to the biggest trail followers. Suddenly, the tribe gets the classic "voting rings" we've all come to hate. It happens to every tribe, and it will happen again.
Voting rings lead to fewer people being noticed by stakers and honest curators. Soon enough, Proof of Brain will have the same old problem that's plagued Hive and Steem before it: a money-farming loophole superseding the need for any proof-of-brain itself.
The road to true success
That is why you must say "no" to anything automated. If stakers don't want to be active, then they should delegate, forfeiting upvote rewards completely. If they don't want to invest their own time curating, they can delegate to a curator, which at least forces them to check how the POB project is doing every once in a while.
I dare say more projects can learn from Splinterlands' success. You will profit a bit if you simply spend $10k in boosters and let it sit for 2 years, but you will profit so much more if you are active in one way or another in the game. How many non-bot players do you guys think Splinterlands would have if it allowed card owners to earn just as much by being 100% passive?
Bottom line is... If you love POB, don't compensate passive users as much as active users. Stick to your ideals, for the sake of the project.
post presenting HiveImage from @finguru's
Best content anywhere. I spend 100 % of my time on POB now, only upvoting manually from the POB Front end. POB is the greatest invention since Steemit.
I'm a little divided on this. On one hand, I agree with you about the ideals but there's nothing stopping a big account from auto-voting someone they like. A manual curation trail seems to be a compromise.
Then there's the question of what deserves an upvote from the trail. Is it solely quality of content? What about how the user stakes / sells all their pob? Edit: Also, should number of upvotes from the trail already received be a factor?
Lastly, as the beneficiary of a delegation, I like the idea and I see how it has helped me grow my faster and spread more pob around than I would otherwise have been able to. That said, I don't expect any account to delegate the majority of their stake.
On that note, I would also suggest setting the rewards to 75/25 author-curation and excluding self-votes completely.
Yes! I agree with the abolition of self-voting!
However, I don't know what could be done to prevent someone creating an alt account to self-vote on their other account... Maybe nothing?
If everyone was on board with this, monitoring would help identify these cases and reporting it would let people know who not to vote.
True
Cooperation is key
I agree that our POB community is growing, and a lot of people are looking for shortcuts to earn their ROI
They are willing to automate their curating ability so that they have less or no work to do on the platform
If we encourage this, it will take away the real intention and purpose we started with
Engagement moves the platform forward, and we need to do all that we can to see that it improves on a daily basis instead of reducing
Thank you. Go POB!
I'm glad you have brought this up for discussion, it's a problem that needs to be solved. I don't have the time to respond as in-depth as I would like but I will return when I have time to comment and I'll keep up to date with the discussion in the meantime to see where we can go from here.
This is the most important thing. No repeating the same bullshit.
Yes. I too think we need more posts about this topic.
Something different would be nice for a change...
Where are the socially active users on the Hive blockchain?
Nowadays I see a lot of posts with hundreds of upvotes, but literally no comments. Or only bot comments. Taking a look at the comment section of this platform is disappointing.
Hive is basically all robot votes these days.
Exactly. POB has a lot of comments on the other hand!
Struggling to disagree with what you've posted! I was on the automated voting trail for the Ink Well for my first week or two of Hive use, but realised that my votes were going to content that I didn't even like, or not even reading the posts because I thought I'd already seen the content because of my upvote. Manual curation does take decent amount of effort, but after finding communities, tags and users you like it becomes a lot easier to blast through the content you need to catch up on for the day and give out your 25% daily upvote power.
Being more mindful of who/what you follow goes a long way into being more productive. That's a very hard habit to develop for sure though!
This is awesome. I just got to know about POB recently and I totally buy into the idea. This is the kind of community I want to belong to for the long term. I sincerely hope that things will not derail in the nearest future. Let's see how things will unfold in the coming months.
Proof of Brain is how things were meant to be.
I fully understand what proof of brain is about now and it's a bad idea to take away the one thing that interest users here - organic engagement.
Well, there's actually nothing wrong with an introduction of a voting trail. But notwithstanding, the "said" trail leader is the actual point to consider. I understand that in anyway, there's always going to be these urge to upvote favorite authors, but then, there are still certain community runners with a really diversified voting activity.
So then, I am not totally against voting trails, but people following trails should be worried how the leaders use these power given.
Yes, using a curation trail only makes sense if the curator is voting consistently with the way you would vote.
This brings up an important point:
I began trailing @calumam because he had clearly demonstrated a commitment to high-quality curation and a commitment to transparency and also a willingness to call out folks with questionable voting practices (and a commitment to identifying and flagging plagiarism, but that's an altogether separate issue).
However, this just got me thinking, maybe a better use of @calumam's time would be identifying and ranking good curators. He developed a very intricate scoring system for his POB Word of the Week contest. He could surely do something similar for POB curators. If @culamam wanted to shift his efforts toward that end, I would even support a proposal to compensate him modestly for that from the @pob-fund. Of course, he would also be able to earn author rewards for submitting posts that analyze and rank various curators.
@calumam is clearly exceptional so far, I honestly wish to dedicate so much time but then, my lazy as wouldn't let me.
However, following two to three trails might just do the trick. I mean while trail one upvotes posts under the "pob-wotw" tags, trail two upvotes posts under "information wars" and trail three could be general, but this doesn't mean they can't upvote anything outside these said topics, just that the major focus would be on them.
By this, a lager rewards system will be introduced, where the upvotes are widely spread across. It won't be compulsory to follow all three trails as that maybe damage one's Hive power, so maybe two out of three with a "not 100% threshold"
And that brings up a question : how are posts not published through the proofofbrain.io interface treated?
All quality still receive the deserved rewards or there's a reduction?
I honestly don't look at that while voting...
I, personally, do not pay attention to the originating front-end -- if it's good content and either uses the #proofofbrain tag or originates on the proofofbrain.io front-end, I consider it; however, I believe @calumam has publicly stated that he does not vote for any posts that do not originate on the proofofbrain.io front-end. The rationale behind that is the authors who post using the POB front-end receive 80% less (40% of the total rewards instead of 50%), with the balance going to the @pob-fund (which is dedicated to maintaining the front-end). He is honoring their commitment to the tribe by only voting for content originating on the tribe's front-end.
There is no reduction in rewards per se, except that some folks who might have voted for your content (if it had originated on the tribe's front-end) probably won't even look at it.
It's easier for me in all honesty. I do want to reward people taking part directly in the community but I'd be lying if I said it was completely selfless. I try not to spread myself too thin in this environment, it's very easy to get overwhelmed.
I'm up for the task at some point, but currently, I'm up against it with the WOTW contest, voting, and keeping up with my own engagement (not bad problems to have by any means).
Once I have some of the responsibilities for WOTW delegated out to a responsible team of people I'll shift my focus onto this. I think it's the next logical step towards high-quality curation platform-wide and it starts to link back to previous suggestions about classified curators and better tag management.
This is an issue that we all have to do.
To what extent does it affect us as new to the community?
Are we inevitably going in that direction?
Who would be the main actors?
They are questions, which arise for me at the moment.
I thought autovoting on hive cuts across other community tribes because when an author receives an autovote on hive on a content with the #proofofbrain tag, the vote reflects on the proofofbrain frontend as well. So is there anyway autovoting can be disabled on the proof of brain frontend irrespective of the fact that one is autovoted through the hive/peakd frontend?
see here, tl;dr might be possible
That's also a good idea as well. I've check through the link in the description.
I think a curation trail is great, to be honest. I understand, that it might get abused. But those people are unlikely to benefit as much as everyone else. You can't stop people from being lazy. They might as well get on the "new" page and upvote the top 5 posts twice a day. Bam! Curation done!
Finding somebody you trust to curate daily and hopefully even well, is not easy. I personally feel much more comfortable holding the reins of my upvotes in my own hands. I don't have much time. But I will take the time for this. Not because I'm a romantic, that is afraid of the wrong person getting an upvote. I'm pretty selfishly motivated. I just like to be sure, that I have my minimum of ten upvotes, when I go to bed.
Also it's a great motivation to keep reading, what's going on at POB and hopefully get some inspiration to write something interesting myself.
Find a group of people who constantly write about things you enjoy reading. Problem Solved. Having a hard time finding a group of 10 people? Make a post announcing you have stake and that you're looking to read content of a specific type, asking that people who write about it say hi... That's all it takes.
The first problem with 'banning' the use of curation trails (or any type of auto-voting) is that it is currently impossible for the blockchain (and thus the community) to know the difference between an auto-vote and a manual vote. However, this could be fixed through the front-end, if we require a 'captcha' style confirmation with each and every upvote -- that does diminish the user experience somewhat, though, and that would require upvotes ONLY be cast via the front-end.
A much bigger problem, though, is exemplified by this comment from @antonym:
If a stakeholder is using one or more curation trails, that means he/she is trying to at least indirectly contribute to meaningful curation. If you take that away, you inadvertently incentivize random manual curation that muddies the curation waters far worse than curation trails.
I disagree. Stacking votes on good content would be the most optimal choice. In fact, it would be that much important. Not to mention, voting on random people means they will sel all the POB they get, which would be bad for large stakers.
Back to share some of my thoughts. I've had a look over some of the comments and it's clear that the compromising aspect of curation trails is a popular position. I can understand that in the here and now, but your post is hitting onto "bigger picture thinking" and what this means for the platform down the line. Something I stand by 100%.
This is obviously not a simple solution and we still have to take the importance of wider distribution into account. The idea behind delegations and smart contracts that you proposed is something in the right direction, although for this to be a viable option we would need to find a way to completely remove auto-votes and curation trails (otherwise people will choose those over a reduction in earnings, people suck, money rules, yes).
You proposed the 75/25 reward split in the comments and I think this is a step in the right direction in terms of spreading the tokens, building up stakeholders, and adding more liquidity to the market. K.I.S.S.
I'm going to take this idea and run with it, hopefully drawing up an official proposal this week and seeing what the general opinion is from the community.
@leprechaun, is it possible to remove curation trails and auto-voting within the community or does that happen on the HIVE level?
There is no doubt that this uniqueness of POB has sparked tremendous interest in participation in the Hive community, I would venture to say far above any tribe, almost on the level of a revolution. One of the things that attracted me to POB is its drive to place human processes above technical ones to not only create content but also money, it is an economy based (in theory) on the natural intelligence of people, microprocessors and algorithms.
But logically we are human, therefore we are not perfect, we do not all process engagement in the same way, but this is not something to criticize, and although it sounds contradictory or reprehensible, the fact that some opt for the shortcuts of automation is simply applying a situation that is allowed by the system implemented in Hive.
I guess we should choose to reward the values that promote the ethics and morals of POB, in this way more people will assume the rules or commitments agreed by the community, at least I think that would happen from a theoretical point of view because all processes are truly unpredictable, but of one thing I am sure, POB is unstoppable and I have the feeling that it will not end like other communities.
Although you say that POB is unstoppable, your compliance with the community is quite low, if you have great content, you leave little or nothing on it.
If I am right, staying in Stake not only benefits those who do it, but it is also a collective good that strengthens the community. You can well see how in that aspect Leofinance is quite solid, due to the number of people who keep more than 75% of the tokens in Stake.
This article, if you notice, mentions this aspect, that if you should take into account how much and how the population is sold, and whether or not a% remains in Stake.
And if I know that you are based on the responsibilities of life outside of a screen.
I remind you that we all have responsibilities.
Some of us believe in communities and we don't just get what you get.
Don't take this personally, but it's good to preach facts and not have a double talk looking for POb lake in the comments!
You tell me not to take it personal but the one who is doing it is you not me.... You are still within your rights to express what you think about me or whatever you think. Greetings.
not at all, just that I think it would be nice not to have a double talk.
It is not good to appear commitment, because sooner or later they will realize it.
I'm not saying it for you especially, although if you want to take it for advice, Great!
For Proof Of Brain and what the blockchain stands for honestly I feel that delegation shouldn't be a thing. What makes this all work is that everyone engages and curates. You can still on hive anyways earn some passive income from staking your claim but if you curate and post you can increase your APR dramatically and I believe those putting in the work should be rewarded more.
Maybe if curation by delegation was less than doing it yourself I would be for it but I personally don't like it and I feel it really takes away from the platform and starts removing the POB aspect of it all. It also kills engagement. Why should I spend time curating content when I can just delegate it to someone else and earn as much if not more?
*For me the answer is because I believe in the platform and need to lead by example
To others however I feel only very few have that same feeling and delegate out instead.
Some people have written about how it's not easy to find someone who is trustworthy. They have a good point. Because they still need to be a little bit active, I feel it would be okay to delegate, since they would be earning less anyway. Some brain activity is still required.
I fully agree that the commitment is made manually, personally I make all my votes manually, and although I have not yet reached my first goal of 1000 pops in stake, daily I can get some pops.
At the same time I enjoy the different publications, with a refreshing drink by my side.
This way I try to cover a lot of content, and I give it a 100% vote.
This week my interaction has been low, I have taken it as a rest and taking advantage of the social experiment of @calumam that seems to be disqualified. (Although I agree with @ sheila23, that publication did not meet one of the requirements and it was to make a clear reference to the word bizarre), it was still a good time of rest.
This week you will see a little more of @clicmaster in their articles! I can't leave all the fun to @edystringz, who by the way does an excellent job of engagement. I am sure that when she turns into a little whale she will be an excellent content curator!
OH no worries, we are all here to support you so you can reach all your goals.
Lol. I love doing this with my favorite drink-Pepsi
You do 100% vote? Oh my! I tried it once and I watch my power drain to 53%, I couldn't engage for days and that was the most boring days of my life 😅
It's good you had some rest because this week I want to see you around as you have promised 🙈
I can't leave all the fun to @edystringz, who by the way does an excellent job of engagement.
Lol. I don't want to be having all the fun alone either. More people joining the fun is better than less 😊
Hehehe..... I pray for the grace to do all that is and will be required of me.
Thank you so much, @clicmaster
This is something I enjoy doing, hehe. Having a couple of snacks around while going through contents helps me have a better understanding of it, and in turn make a tangible contribution.
@espandorr I hope you will waybill some of your snacks and drinks for me, but I can join in making tangible contributions too
!PIZZA
!BEER
$PIZZA@felipejoys! I sent you a slice of on behalf of @eii.
Learn more about $PIZZA Token at hive.pizza
View or trade
BEER.BEERHey @felipejoys, here is a little bit of from @eii for you. Enjoy it!Learn how to earn FREE BEER each day by staking your
BEER.I am tied up for the next few days, but will definitely weigh in on this conversation when I get a chance.
I am upvoting this post 100% so that it gets maximum exposure and maximum engagement. Please check back often, because I expect comments will keep coming in for at least a week or so.
Thank you for your attention!
Ponto bem bacana! Eu decidi que na Hive e na POB eu não vou automatizar meus votos. Eu quero ler os conteúdos, quero ter certeza do que estou votando, não sair votando a revelia, ou porque outras pessoas votaram.
Também quero sempre encontrar novos conteúdos, novas pessoas, novos mundos. Sei que vai tomar tempo, mas aqui é um investimento, não só em mim, mas na vida de outras pessoas, ao contrário de outras redes em que geralmente nada de produtivo sai de interação e votos(likes).
I will be writing something on this topic this week. I think you do bring up good points, but I also think that there is room for trails. Splinterlands has seen great success, but also had automation. For most people, botting was out of reach.
I earn a fraction on a trail what I would earn manually curating, but my life does not give me the time to do a good job. I know a few people that do a good job and when I am not voting, they vote for me. I will get more into it on my post in the next few days and will be sure to tag you.
I believe it is very important to get this thing right as POB is a really great place to be, and we should keep it that way.
PON has begun to reflect a bit of wear and tear in the price, it is evident that we do not have an infallible token to all the correction that is happening as we speak here.
It will be interesting to see who will be left when the price corrects a little more and the rewards are not as juicy as they can and are now!
It is a great experiment that will gradually purge the weak and will undoubtedly leave the most consistent!
true!
I really appreciate the effort that everyone is trying to avoid the mistakes made in the past. It serves the POB community well.
I am not against automatic voting because it has allowed me to support my favourite writers and at the same time, it helped my account grow.
It can be a good thing.
I think this is a conversation that we will keep on having to maintain the integrity of the space.
What I read from your comment is "I vote for the same people every time without checking, so whatever. Just let me keep doing that." Exactly what POB isn't about, huh?
Not exactly.
I have a few people on my automatic voting who’s post I enjoy and read.
For POB I do everything manually. Check new, hot and trending.
All I was saying is that if you enjoy someone posts regularly, then putting them on auto voting isn’t a bad idea.
But that’s how I feel about it.
proof of brain should not allow anything automated and work on building strong community together. we can see the growth and how things have turnout. we must not let same mistake repeat it self often
In my opinion, as you said there shouldn't be any automated curation. Not automated at all, so not a trail as we can often see. Not a big account with a big upvote value followed by few other accounts automatically voting.
A way to do this without any automation should be a curation account, encouraging people to delegate some POB to it. Manually curating content and reblog it !!
Most of time curation account only curate and even sometimes make a post of the best content they saw, here rebloging some posts should also help to have more curators without having to create an automatic trail.
Time and dedication is key
i second your view also and i think that vote automation will ruin the good thing that POB has going for it. i myself am not an active author like I use to and I understand that it doesn't profit me in any way. so in order to change people mentality, manual curation is the way out and that's what POB is trying to achieve. i notice some big whales coming unto the platform of late and they may want to form voting rings to recoup their investment without really doing anything for the platform. so I think manual voting should continue to exist
Exactly. Otherwise, why use POB instead of hive?