The system IS fixed. Autovoting and curation rewards have fixed the system, to encourage and pay for "band wagon voting".
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The system IS fixed. Autovoting and curation rewards have fixed the system, to encourage and pay for "band wagon voting".
As @sigmajin said, this is completely wrong. The curation rewards system penalizes bandwagon voting. People vote for the currently-popular posts for reasons having nothing to do with curation rewards. They may be reasons you disagree with, but it is done despite the cost incurred in reduced curation rewards.
Arguably one reason for the problem is that curation rewards are too small. There was actually more effort put into (time consuming and careful) curation, including by me, before curation rewards were not cut to a mere shadow of their former magnitude, and this was at a time when the STEEM price was little different from what it is now. (Not only were they cut in half from 50% to 25% of the pool, but the early voting penalty, which includes the added by-default autovote, reduces them further still.)
Blockchains work by getting external actors (in this case curators) to perform a task by offering incentives. If you slash the incentives you will get less effort invested in the task. In this case, less effort on good curation.
Curation rewards were intended to get people to read and vote for excellent content. People vote to earn rewards. Call it fixed or not. It doesn't promote good content or avid curation when the same 5 -10 accounts reap most of the reward pool each day. No I am not jealous, I think it is irresponsible and bad for the platform.
"Excellent content" is subjective. People vote on posts they like. You may not agree with the Trending page, but that doesn't mean the system is broken (though you could argue the community's choice is).
Curation rewards encourages people to seek and find new content that have very few votes but may turn out to be successful. Bandwagon voting, as others have pointed out, are most unprofitable.
Yes, I know excellent content is subjective. It is the perfect line. I don't care strickly about the trending page, I care more about the trending articles and the exactly same votes they receive every day. Maybe someone could create an awesome voting trail or bot which... Votes on something different every couple of days. ;) I can't and won't fix it. I will say again it is very short sighted. The site and the Lottery feel talked about in the white paper, it is boring. Blah. (to me) Look, I have no power in it. I am just sharing an opinion, a view. It can easily be disregarded. I am not the only one thinking it or saying it.
As a matter of fact, the most successful voting bots by curation rewards are the ones voting on new, fresh content. They are successful because there are curation guilds following up their votes. I'd guide you to research on @biophil's bot - he has the most successful curation bot running on Steemit and has several clients (and stalkers) that follow it. So, the reward system does actively incentivize what you are looking for, and to suggest that it encourages bandwagon voting is mistaken.
That said, if there were no curation guilds like Steem Guild, Steem Trail or Curie, these curation bots would not succeed and it'd go back to bandwagon voting.
Nested reply: Thanks for the advice. I would rather read and vote. Thank you though, I believe your intentions are good. Steem On.
check the curation rewards for some of the major whales. Bernie sanders was the highest i saw, and his rewards ended up being about one tenth of one percent of his SP balance for the week. Thats actually probably misleadingly high, because he probably probably gets to vote first when he votes for curie.
Smooth made something like .005 percent. dan something like .02%. The fact is, whale voters are the primary thing that determines what content gets paid, and no whale voter that i can find makes enough from curation rewards to be incentivized or dis-incentivized either way.
Bots are actually a huge curation-rewards disincentive for whales to vote for the same people over and over again. Because once they do so, they will start to get frontrun.
You could argue (and it would be a good point, IMO) that the very fact that the effective range of curation rewards is so small is a problem. For example, from a standpoint of just trying to maximize curation rewards, how much effort is it really worth for a smooth to get a couple hundred extra a week return (which is likely about the best he could do) on a half million dollar balance?
I don't know how else to say it. Voting for already-trending posts does not generate significant curation rewards. You get high curation rewards for identifying new (unvoted or lightly-voted) content that doesn't have votes yet. That takes effort, time, and talent to recognize what will become popular if promoted.
Not really... curation rewards aren't that high, and actually penalize you for bandwagoning. Downvoting would solve a lot of this, if it started being common for overvalued posts. The reason people can vote for bad posts and be sure theyll do fairly well is because they know people won't downvote them for being bad.
The trending page says different.
there are a lot of reasons for why the trending page is the way it is. I think the taboo against downvoting is one of the big ones. But the top heavy distribution also helps a lot.
Agreed
I disagree that curation rewards fix the system. I think they encourage finding content that would be valued by other users. Unfortunately it's not working that way in practice and that could be down to all the stigma of the downvote which would discincentivise those curators who over-value posts from doing so.
The auto-voting however, does cause users to see the system as fixed.