Why is this? Is it something to be concerned about? If so, what can we do to resolve this?
Voting Blind on Steemit - Quick Chat with @Mrs.Steemit
Why is this? Is it something to be concerned about? If so, what can we do to resolve this?
Why is this? Is it something to be concerned about? If so, what can we do to resolve this?
I have seen the same things on my unlisted videos that went only to steemit. One video had 300 something votes, 40 comments and the video itself after a full week had only 11 views. The #witness @proctologic has also done an experiment on this post: https://steemit.com/american/@proctologic/best-saturday-night-in-stockholm-sweden where the large part of the article is "lorem ipsum" blocks, and nobody has noticed it yet and/or commented on it :)
He should join us on http://steemspeak.com/#!join-radio/ and talk about all these things with us!
Yeah, I keep meaning to come and check it out. I should have some free time tonight :)
YESS!!! @piedpiper I agree with @poeticsnake - we need your voice on SteemSpeak Radio
That would be great! :D I hope you will find the time this evening to drop by and say hello!
The Bots are taking over! ;)
Yup. This has been my experience ever since I started. :-/
Didn't read the post or watch the video, but I saw a good discussion going so I read that.
That's funny because Lorem Ipsum is a common block of text. Where are all the anti-plagiarism bots? :D
[
] Hello @Mrs.Steemit and @piedpiper
I looked at the video and I always do. Steemit is a new thing. People try to get everything here at the moment because it is something new, me to so I use 10 hours a day here. That will change. When you by a newspaper you look at "your" stuff there. If you by a new magazine you never seen before you will try to look at everything. On top of that, this is something completely new to people: paid to vote, STEEM, cryptocurrency, blockchain, and getting better in English if it is not your native language, WOW :-) They can not do it all at once. So something will have to be left out on the way to understand it. The whole project was to take the cryptoworld to the mainstream and that has started. So strange things will happen all the time for a while. Some years I think, and that is nice. The evolution in a big scale has finally started.
Regard
Ramta the Viking of Norway
I love this project :-) and I vote when it looks like something I like. It is not anything to be concerned about and absolutely nothing to solve. I need to get a grasp of it all and then it will be solved by itself.
This project is only some months old. Nothing else to expect in my opinion. I have never spoken english in my whole life, but I can read and write it. Do not understand so good when i look at videos.
I think @mrs.steemit is right that video length matters, as a lot of people either don't have the time to sit down and watch a long video or just don't have the attention span, that's the world we live in..
On the other hand this post clearly shows that vote count quickly becomes decoupled from actual views even for short videos. Part of the reason for that is people who have a lot of accounts and automatically vote with all of them, I tend to do that for example. So say I watch the video and vote with my main account, that triggers voting from 2 of my other accounts.
Another reason is what @craig-grant said in a comment here that a lot of people, especially some of the whales, have this miner mentality where it's all about maximising profits. So they vote automatically for certain authors and setup bots to maximise their curation earnings and basically milk Steem for as much profit as they can. Unfortunately there's not much we can do about this at the moment, although the vote recharge changes that were postponed/cancelled might've helped with this. Making voting power more of a scarce resource would make "spam voting" harder which is a good thing in my opinion.
The reason videos don't autoplay is to optimise the performance of opening a post, as loading lots of videos will slow down the rendering a lot. What Steemit does now is simply render a static preview image that you have to click on to actually load the video, it lets the page load a lot faster.
I know Facebook autoplays videos in your feed when you scroll over them and that might be an option in the future here too, but I'm not sure it would really help with people actually watching the videos to the end. I rarely watch the videos on Facebook to the end even though they start automatically. There's a bandwidth concern there as well of course.
Hehe, cool experiment.
A few of my thoughts on the current situation of steemit posts.
Let's say I am a user who used to browse facebook and youtube only, and have recently joined Steemit. I know for a fact that many of my friends who do the same have gotten tired of even trying to read those comments added to the facebook content or youtube videos, so it might just be a bad habit to most readers not to read the comments here or not even the full post just skim through the images.
As a long time Redditor, I loved reading the comments and the ability to vote and filter those out yourself too. I think Steemit needs to fix the incentive of users commenting quality responses and showing they have watched the content. Thus eliminating spambots (maybe not A.I bots...) and rewarding users by doing so without being afraid of losing Voting Power for it.
With the quality lately rising in content I am sure comments will be the next thing to improve, and I personally can't wait for that to happen. One thing I've learned from previous platforms is that even if the post isn't of too much quality or the trending one of the day, the comment section can be a place full of innovation, quality and entertainment just as much as reading blogposts.
Great points. Thanks for the input :)
219 up votes currently, but 26 Views...and I don't think that people even click on the video and check it's length as @mrs.steemit said, I think that It doesn't even get clicked on. I've had a post where a video was part of it, but from say 80 people only 3 bothered to actually watch it, the video had a disclaimer that It had to be watched, clearly stating it's part of the post and that the video wasn't mine and very high quality content worthwhile watching. The conclusion I can draw from my experience on steemit is that:
the top voters have a cryptocurrency mining mentality, they earned most of their money mining, and voting to them is like confirming a crypto transaction, not about content
Yeah, that's an interesting way of explaining it.
agree. i vote a lo to support people but try to really read all of it.
I can understand the frustration. Curation really is the most important thing on the platform. All the controversy about sock puppets and such could be solved for the most part if people would read the posts and watch the videos. To be honest, your title caught my attention, so I watched the video. This is a nice experiment.
Thanks. :)
With the attention span people have these days the shorter, the better...
Yeah. Bite-sized little nuggets of goodness.
Resteemed and tweeted!
LOL I'm commenting on actually watching this video :)
lol Thanks ;)
Thank you for your support! Followed !
Thank you :)
Thanks Mrs. Steemit :) great experiment :)
Very interesting post! I did watch the entire video!
@kus-knee (The Old Dog)
This is a comment to indicate I watched the whole thing hehe.. I have been following you for a while but only just discovered @mrs.steemit
p.s: I always wonder how you get the white wall on your back!? haha.. can't really be that clean! lol
lol Thanks, Chitty. The backdrop is just a projector screen. I put a white-balanced fluorescent light behind me, shining up at it and another one in front of me, by the camera. I'm using a 50mm lens on a Cannon DSLR and the exposure is dialed up to +2
Most articles take about two minutes to read max, whereas a "short" video is 4 minutes, and that's really too long.
It also depends on where the reader/viewer is. If they are steeming from work, they can't risk watching videos, the sound will attract the attention of their boss.
Finally, bot are voting more than humans on this site. Human voters melted away when they found that their minnow vote increased the value of the post they were reading but they didn't get a curation award (because they're minnows).
Also, human voters like reciprocity. They vote for you, they expect you to pay them a visit back and vote for their stuff. If you don't they stop voting - if there is no social reward and no monetary reward, what is the point? Whereas the bot voters will vote regardless because it is profitable for them.
Yup. Good points, for sure.
Totally agreed with you guys. However I don't really think that this issue is only about videos. I noticed the same thing with posts.
I did an experiment to test how much people are actually voting, and I used steemstats.com to track when people upvote and I found out that there are lots of bots out there. It is so funny to look at this stack of cards notifying that you've been upvoted.
To be honest, this is not cool. I would rather prefer people to upvote if they actually read the post and like it, or watched it in your case.
Also I would personally thank developers who will add statistics about the percentage and number of people who have read the post vs the upvotes it got. It would be a terrific information.
To make it even more fun I would like to see stats about detailed review of how the post was read. I mean, how fast it was read (whether it was scrolled, skipped or read normally) and the amount of text that was read in the post in percentages, and probably some other interesting info.
I know this sounds like too much, and don't think it will ever be created here but who forbidden the fantasy, right?
Besides, piedpiper, you are my favorite content producer regardless Steemit info. You are explaining everything in simple, direct and clear way, and I adore it.
Waiting for your next episodes,
Dmitriy
Thanks :) I wonder if the developers could find a way to separate the genuine, manual votes from bot votes somehow. They're both nice but they signify different things so it would be cool if we could tell them apart.
This might be crucial for the platform's adoption... and success!
I watch all videos you post. Great topics and info.
Thanks Silverbug :)
I watched the video till the end. I always do btw.
I believe in growth of steemit but I am afraid of way how will grow. In first week I thought this is the right place to start blogging. The blockchain based site full of geeks becomes site of people who want to money in first case, no matter what way. I am not very optimistic but I like the idea of the project. That is reason why I want to stay.
very impressive , 85 votes so far, 5 comments :D.
I am going to resteem this
Yeah, it's still a baby with some serious growing up to do... but I'm still optimistic too :)
thanks for support.
I did indeed watch it all. And liked it on YouTube! Okay, I have a thought, does watching the embedded video here on Steemit count? I noticed that I was the 3rd viewer on YouTube but more folks are posting here.
Right on. Thanks :)
Good question.. I'm not sure about that. If anybody knows please comment. Thanks for your support!
It does count but the tally isn't always updated in real time.
Okay, makes sense.
lol. I watched the video.
Nice :)
I agree with @mrs.steemit : It's all about the format.
I like the short videos. 4-10min max, to take into account that people don't actually spend time on steemit, but browse the site at their lunchbreak, multitasking at the same time on their email or Facebook...
Auto-play could help but will probably not solve the issue. In the end, I believe that the VIDEO format is not 100% adapted to steemit. (imho).
You have other alternatives: I like what @mrs.steemit did with her yoga posts: using GIFS instead of videos.
It was easy to watch and had this kind of autoplay-shortclip taste.
I know well user @bentouch and I can say that is currently working on a post based on his work with the French TV. It's about MUSIC and how dance-hits remix some cool parts of the old disco tunes. (and it's f^*&ing awesome)
He showed me some drafts and I think he has a great answer to the "video-issue" we have on steemit:
He created soundcloud clips and put animated .gif images.
The results is very interesting because it allows a user to read the post in a very easy way: fast enough to multitask and do something else a the same time (what we all often do). The GIFs give you the visual cues you need to understand the process of sampling music to make electronic hits, and the sound cloud clips are short enough to be listened without staying 10min on the post.
TL;DR conclusion:
In our multitasking ADHD world, people will difficultly spend more than 3 minutes on a post with full dedicated attention. The perfect post should take that into account. Many solutions exist, like using GIFs, doing some autoplay. One other solution is to structure the post so that users can listen/read a part and then come back to it. Structure is KEY.
From a "feature" point of view, I believe that curation rewards should be limited when upvoting from the feed-thumbnail view. Basically: Feed-view upvote takes 100% voting power but only yields 50% revenue. Something like that. It will not solve the video issue, but could allow people to dig into posts.
Of course, my answer is probably too long to be read until the end ;-)
Good idea. Next best thing to removing the voting buttons from the feed entirely, I guess.
Badass solution. I like it.
But ihmo Steemit needs a "7 figures" amount of users to do so without harming the platform.
That wouldn't solve much of the bot voting issues at all though. They use the cli_client most of the time to vote anyway, so I doubt that extra step makes it any harder for them.
But for the rest of the users, yes it might give them another incentive to read the content before voting, but then again it might just annoy them an extra step. :P
Btw
Here's the post I mentioned earlier:
https://steemit.com/music/@bentouch/5lybcz-music-theory-1-prodigy-or-piracy-a-punk-s-question
New author and great post!!
Let's give him a warm welcome.
i tend to watch videos that have transcriptions and that are short as @mrs.steemit said. As for youtube, well i am there only for the music. And if i watch the video in steemit, i don't bother going to youtube.
i believe the youtube doesn't count the views in embedded videos probably?
I am 90% sure it does.
It does but it takes time to process and analyze them sometimes. They're checked to see if the votes are legit and not just coming from a sweatshop in Mayanmar or anything. After 300 views are confirmed, the level of scrutiny drops and they are displayed more promptly and accurately.
Yeah. YouTube still keeps track of the views on steemit, even when you don't go to YouTube itself though. It just seems like most voters aren't voting because they actually have an opinion about the content, which would seem to suggest that a change might be in order... maybe we'll see a remedy in a future update.
I've watched thus far ;)
I hope we don't get to the point where videos have to start playing immediately when a post is opened... that was a feature I did not like about fb. People have time to read content in general, but, especially if they are at work, it is a whole different story blaring a video with co-workers around...
Yeah, I'd have to agree with you there. I deactivated that feature as soon as facebook introduced it.
Very good point. Maybe there should be a timer for the video-posts that only allows to vote after the duration of the video is reached. I also sometimes tend to upvote a post like I do on other social networks, just to keep track of posts that I found interesting and then maybe get back to later.
I watch all video , on my last video i was with wrong position on scren and only one person coment on this :P
lol oh crap :-/
I watched it twice, so 2 of those views are mine! :D
I try to keep my videos below 1 minute, usually 30 seconds! Plus I put in the title above the video how long the video is.
Good idea.
It doesn't mean I get many views though!
Great points @piedpiper and @mrs.steemit - I also commented on the Youtube video. Here's the big question though: You promised anyone who commented your up-vote, but will you truly read their recent post!? Haha, You might be busy as this already has 45+ comments!
I like your idea, @piedpiper, about hiding the up-vote option until the bottom of the article. I think some people like to jump on the "trending bandwagon" and up-vote things that seem to be instantly popular with the community, before actually reading the content. This is evident anytime you post 500 words, and you have up-votes within seconds. Other times, I think people up-vote others who they follow to show their respect/appreciation.
Good job, both of you, for bringing up this point, though. We all want to continue to make the community better, and there may be potential improvements in this area :)
I'm at the very least, skimming the post to make sure it's not something that I wouldn't want to show support for. So far, no problems. I even upvoted a chicken soup recipe despite my veganism. :)
That's awesome, haha.
So I believe this will take care of itself in the long run.
Right now we're still in the distribution phase. The goal is to spread the SP around as quickly as possible. Curators can't get caught up on single posts. They have to make quick judgement calls about whether or not to distribute influence to each Steemer.
Right now, curators have to vote 40 times a day to maximize their influence. If I watched 40 full youtube videos a day I'd be fat and broke, lol. But when the community finally agrees to adopt a voting algorithm where single votes are worth more (like the one that got rejected in the last hard fork), then you'll see individual pieces of content getting more views.
Example: If you only had 5 big votes to give out per day rather than 40 small ones... you'd be encouraged to dive deeper into the content.
Content will start to get more attention as:
ps. I watched the whole video and liked it on Youtube!
Thanks! Yeah, I can't wait for your third point to come to fruition. I like how subreddits all have different moods and personalities about them. In time, I'd love to see Steemit fracture like that instead of being a single, uniform blob of blue and white.
I watched the whole video, but did not upvote because I see it is already quite well rewarded for a 4 minute video. :)
The reason you get so many upvotes is that you are on bot lists for continuously producing good content. If you start posting worse content, the bot authors will likely remove you from their lists. These bot owners also usually have lots of SP spread over many accounts, which inflates the vote count.
This reply has 100 upvotes! But it means nothing, as they are just bots.
Yup, I suspect a lot of the votes are from bots... I take them as compliments - signs that my contribution is appreciated in a general sense, but it's a shame that they don't reflect the perceived value of the individual posts themselves. I love market signals and like to see them as clearly as possible... I guess that's why I welcome flags. They're just as valuable when they actually signify the opinions of the viewers.
The vote "number" is sybil attack-able, which is why I have been advocating it to be removed. It provides a false sense of support for a post. My reply was REALLY not worth 100 upvotes, but there it is; because I decided to use 100 sybils.
Brilliant point! I could totally get behind that.
@nanzo-scoop made a post about that today.
https://steemit.com/curation/@nanzo-scoop/but-it-said-do-not-vote-so-why-did-i-vote-on-it
@freedomengineer here and I always watch @piedpiper's videos all the way through. BUT I have been guilty of voting on Steemit posts without reading them all the way through. Usually it's because I see a topic that I already know about, but I just don't have the time to read the entire article, yet I want to see topics that I like represented on Steemit and rewarded.
Watched to the end.
Watched to the end :)
Roger that!
Bot's don't use buttons, they use algorithms and heuristics and then vote by interacting directly with the blockchain. The feed button is just people voting for friends.
BTW I watched the whole video. But generally I vote people I like and want to show support for and I think most others (even bot owners) feel the same way.
Interesting point. Yeah, removing the button would only curb the votes from people that are doing it manually, I guess.
Watched to the end. Maybe transcripts would help?
Yeah, they probably would. Sometimes watching videos just isn't an option.
I agree with you, I prefer short videos (about 5 minutes).
Haha, I watched! Very interesting experiment.
That's right, but there are number of bots as well sometimes triggers new comers to upvote without reading/watching video... Great experiment btw ;-)
A few things...
I think a lot of people will watch THIS video because the subject-matter is enticing. I don't think video length is a major issue. I think it is true to say that there are more votes than there are people consuming content.
A large portion votes are from bots. If you read my last post (as well as upvote it) you'll see that I use a bot to upvote. I also review posts I upvote however I'm not sure how many other bot owners do. Most bots don't visit the front end of Steemit to vote. What would be interesting would be to see a view count for posts. I'm convinced we'll find more upvotes than pagesviews on a lot of posts.
There are many layers to this. There are people upvoting for curation rewards only (its part of the game). There are people upvoting because they like the author however may not have time to read/ consume their content.
I'm sure the layers go deeper still... I wonder how many people comprehend what they read. I read somewhere that the average reader reads 200 wpm and has a comprehension of 60%. This was staggering me. It got me wondering how many people truly 'get' what is being communicated to them, when they do read it. I know I've read some posts (that I haven't voted on) and they've flown way over my head. And I consider myself reasonably intelligent.
Although it may sound semi-depressing I don't think it is. For me it's indicative of just how green the platform is. Despite the 100k accounts and 4k 'active' daily users, I think the real figures of 'true users' is actually much much smaller. There is still massive room for the platform to grow however there is a pressing need to make a push on user adoption and get more people using the site!
That's true. It's like the small town I grew up in... 500 people that all know one another. lol It has a lot of growing up to do, that's for sure.
In todays world, many people are willing to reward people with upvotes for creating and sharing content when they have seen content by the provider before without watching the new content. The reason this happens from what I have seen is lack of attention span to actually pay attention to the videos, so in turn most people either skim through them or don't even bother to watch them at all and just skim through the comments to figure out real fast what the video covered and just jump in with their thoughts. Its something that no matter what we do won't change, but combating bots will help unskew things some, but in the grand scheme bots will always find a way to prevail no matter what is done to combat them. The best we can really hope to do is minimize their rewards and power.
Good vid ! Sign off at 3:52 ...
I watched. I've seen a few of your videos and have been impressed.
I watch all your video. I enjoy them.
Cute girl!
Probably that's the first video here I have watched till the end ;D
@piedpiper Old hair style is good, Steem upvote thing force every blogger to do go for $$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$, watch it to then end and put comments to youtube page also. so some due watch the videos then upvote it.
i think a lot of ppl just vote looking for curation
yup
upvoted and watched the video to the end. cos i am also very interested in this particular topic of the extent of ppl simply upvoting for curation fees. (okok i do it sometimes as well i will admit it - cos just starting out and still trying to suss out authoring bit). At the end of the day, this is important as ppl and bots continue to game the system, it will be reflected in the long term performance of steem price and wealth creation for all. plus there are so many steemit competitors running behind after it. Very rare you will find pioneers as market leaders nowadays. case in point, yahoo (google), palm (apple), motorola (nokia, which is dead now as well). And in cryptoland, things move multiple times as fast as normal tech world, which is also why steemit needs to change quickly and adapt fast.
Visto completo
Good point :)
I think people up vote for money on popular authors posts and I up vote for content I like. If voting for money who cares about content right? I'm just a minnow and I have very little power, so I vote to show support and try to leave a comment too.
Watched it and I am following the two of you.
Thanks for this piece. I think it comes down to time concerns of scrolling down an article vs. watching a video. Even shortened videos might not bring a notable effect.
I watched the whole thing...god it sounds so crazy....
Ok but back to the story --heard spirit- :
This is comon knowledge and can be applied to Steemit as well .
When a person or individual that has a good reputation...the bigger the better makes a post people will vote because reputation gives confidence to some people, not to mention if the content is of a whale then all or at least 85% of online users that see the blog/post will upvote.
So once again where one goes ...others follow...
Now that I wrote about that lets discuss Youtube:
Why?
Well some people like you said in your video dont watch it and just press one or more times to load the video...
Youtube takes this and make it into views that in the end will be changed to show from one ip adress -1 view- once 24h ...this is a very old rule of Youtube that hasnt changed for a long time.
Back to Steemit now!
And finally I canot say to what extent but some people are in another category... for example :
I saw so many beautifull post that I could not interact...and it wasnt the fault of the writer, it was my fault for example:
I read his article from top to bottom but I just canot reply..It was about anarchy...or something like that...For that subject I confess that I had noting to say.
So in conclusion people tend to gather at important places and upvote posts with big value..
In my opinion this will not change and I hope that you will not make shorter videos...because...keep in mind the youtube algoritm as well :
Now I have to think about two comments, here and on YT ;) And because my latest post is older than 1 month and cannot be voted any more, you can check my friend's profile ( @zuch.media ), which I really trying to promote, because he is a great artist with a good sense of humor :)
'will do
Yeah figured this was happening. Not sure whats available for tech fixes. I wonder if there is some sort of time lock feature they could incorporate into voting. Where #1 1st you have to actually click on the article but then maybe a 30 second window must pass after that before the upvote button pops up. That way if you have to sit there anyway, might as well read the article. Again not sure if this is technologically possible or at least feasible.