I'm mostly on your side that it isn't harmful, and definitely not in relation to #3. I see a small harm when good authors simply get overlooked because it's convenient to be neutral and vote on burnpost. It's not motivating for them to see that it's mostly #3 and #2 out there, so everyone going #1 instead counts.
I intentionally avoided mentioning it by name, but
regarding curation projects I'm really happy how @curangel works out. While slip ups happen, the general allocation is pretty good in my view. It's public info which curator curated what, so if one of them goes bad it's hopefully recognized sooner than later. Votes also aren't happening instantly and there are a few people checking the queue from time to time. Downvotes are used and delegators can decide where their share of those goes (which isn't used enough, it would be nice to spread those further).
We mostly have very small delegators though, the original idea of giving an option besides autovoting to bigger stakeholders didn't go off. I also published the code so people could set up their own group if they prefer to have better control over who curates with their stake.
I'm open to considering some delegation to @curangel. Last I had heard (perhaps incorrectly), it had stopped downvoting, which made it a non-starter from my perspective. Thanks for the info.
Where can I find a curangel "mission statement" which describes the intended criteria used for upvotes? I'm all for spreading to a tail as a method to attract new users and promote growth (with some nagging concerns that this hasn't worked out so far) but what I've seen from a lot of curation initiatives in the past, there is often a lot of emphasis on rewarding authors just for posting even if the content frankly isn't very good (i.e. it may not be complete utter trash, but no professional site would pay a dime for it, nor would it earn much if anything on revenue-share sites) and certainly isn't good enough to attract a lot of traffic to Steem-powered sites or boost the value of Steem by a sort of reputational halo effect (in fact, often the opposite).
Which I guess is a long winded way of circling back to my support for burnpost: Apart from rewarding engagement modestly (which I support and do), I just don't believe there is that much being posted on Steem that is worthy of real, monetary value. I do find a few such items occasionally, but certainly not every day.
I'd love to see more, but I just don't.
Downvoting stopped for a while, that's correct. When I coded the project I expected the downvote feature to be used more than it actually was, and required it to use all its dv power constantly. It wasn't used nearly as much as I thought, so in the end I was constantly filling up the list which caused a small burnout after a few weeks.
It's up again, still using all its power, but more at once when vp is high. That way I only need to intervene every couple of days, and we're better prepared for more people adding stuff more infrequently.
There's a small about text on https://curangel.com/, but that doesn't answer your question I think. The mission of curangel could very broadly be stated to "reward undervalued posts". There's a upper reward limit and some other hardcoded rules to prevent the worst of abuse (i.e. max 1 vote per author per curator per week), but basically we leave our curators the freedom to define it themselves. The daily compilation lists the votes by curator which makes them attributable, and they're all available on our discord if there's a wish to discuss a vote.
So I'm not sure if the voting meets your quality standards. The tail it votes is huge, so there will naturally be stuff in between where not everyone agrees. Also, the vote values posts finally receive are a little randomized and not at all dependend on the actual quality of that specific post.
For my requirements its doing its job well, spreading value on an active base of sincere users. It doesn't fix PoB by itself, but it's a useful addition to the much required manual curation imo.
I'm not sure that it doesn't. I certainly don't expect everyone to agree on everything.
A huge tail is a good thing IMO, but at the same time it can be abused (if the tail consists of a lot of sock puppet accounts from people taking advantage of the idea that "voting for a tail is good" and not actual growth in the user base). My bottom line view on this is that as long as we don't see net user base growth and Steem gaining in overall visibility and influence (e.g. as visible in alexa rankings) it is all kind of a failure, even if well intended (not intending to single out curangel here, in case it seemed that way; it is even possible that with more support it could help turn the whole ship around).
@smooth I think this is one of the richest discussion I have read in recent time, and I keep reading it over and over again.
Just a comment on curangel's downvote. It is back and alive and thriving! It is being used daily (twice), and it is open to all delegator. Currently this is the only project that allows it as far as I know. I am one of the early investor in the project along with @pharesim's entire stake. I feel completely aligned with the goal of the project.
PS. if nothing else I will combine this comment thread as a post. So that we keep it organized and reflect/add/enhance it over time. Trouble is anything I post will be downvoted.... oh well.. that is life :)