In sports, unfair leverage can be a problem. Many athletes will resort to using some kind of enhancers, be it steroids, EPO, blood doping, or whatever athletes come up with these days. In most sports, there seems to be an essential naivety amongst fans and organizations, and the sport has for all intents and purposes morphed into two sports:
- The real sport
- The sport if not getting caught using doping
There is one sport where everybody seems to have accepted what for fans has been bleeding obvious for decades: body-building. It is safe to say that nobody doing professional body-building is clean, and nobody who has been anything in bodybuilding for at least the last, say, four or five decades, has gotten there without steroids and other types of unnatural leverage.
Posting on steemit is a sport of sort, and the judges, the true judges are actual curators. I know the metaphor is a bit shaky but bear with me. If we say our posts are the sport, a place on the trending pages is the prize, and true curation are the judges, then we could say that any type of leverage or false curation is the equivalent to using steroids in bodybuilding.
As in bodybuilding, on steemit everyone knows the game isn't clean. If everyone who is anybody is using steroids, or in our case, if everyone who is anybody is using bidbots, the only chance you have, as a nobody, to become an anybody is to start using.
In bodybuilding, steroids use has grown so commonplace that bodybuilding has its own natural competitions. Competitions meant exclusively for those rare athletes who have chosen not to use steroids and yet still want to compete on their own natural strengths. Yes, even in natural competitions some people still cheat and use doping anyway, but everybody in it is 100% aware that they shouldn't.
I would like to argue that here on steemit we can achieve the equivalent of body-building natural competitions by agreeing on the use of a simple tag in our posts. A tag that is a promise. A tag also that is an invitation to get punished if you don't keep to your promise.
Introducing the #purecuration tag.
What I want to propose is that we agree on this tag to have the following special meaning:
- I will not use bidbots on this post.
- I will not self-upvote this post from this account or any other account I may have.
- I haven't delegated SP to any leverage initiative that will auto-upvote my posts regardless of content.
- This post will not get upvoted with non-curation votes through any other type of leverage that is under my control.
- This post will not get upvoted with non-curation votes through any other type of leverage that I have acquired and secured in the past.
- If you notice that I use this tag and fail to keep one of the above promises, you are invited to flag this post.
If people like you and me start using this tag and the tag catches on, then the trending page for the #purecuration tag should act like the true stage of pure curation champions. If you like this idea, please, and I don't usually ask this, resteem this post and use the tag in some of your own posts, but most importantly, keep your eye open for others using the #purecuration tag. Look at their posts and upvote them if and only if they deserve your upvote. True curration.
Interesting idea!
How do curation trails play in? Are they forbidden? Auto-votes? Other people gifting you bot-votes?
The base idea would be: As long as the author did not make it happen. It should be the authors pure intent to subject his/her post only to pure curation. To get upvoted by people, not bots and people who actually looked at the post before upvoting. I know its all a bit fuzzy as there, like in bodybuilding, will always be ways to cheat. Any better and more concise wordings are welcome.
What are your thoughts about the idea?
I think exactly that there will always be ways to cheat so my question was how you plan to deal with them :)
I would hope the #purecuration trending page would attract some scrutiny and the community could self-correct on a best effort, and that the consent to get flagged if caught would keep many away from trying to cheat.
I might write some visualisation scripts (like the flag-wars scripts on @pibarabot) if the tag catches on if I find these might help exposing specific types of trying to cheat, but mostly it should be a community thing of people agreeing to use the tag as intended and inviting flags if they end up, basically doing the equivalent of using steroids in preparation for an all natural bodybuilding competition.
There is a tag, #nobidbot that some people use, but it's not as strict as with some of your points.
And so initiatives like SBD, qurator, make-a-whale, etc would be out?
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