A way to organize Steemit's content based on its quality.
Currently on the Steemit interface we have a few choices when looking for posts to read: the menus Home, Trending, Hot, New, Promoted.
When we have a list of posts, like we have in Trending or Hot or New, a dropdown can be added that allows you to reorder the posts. The choices in the dropdown can be:
- Order posts by number of upvotes received.
- Order posts by reward received.
- (Optionally even) Order posts by their number of views.
A further option (perhaps as a checkbox) can be added to filter the posts so that only posts for which the payout is still pending are shown. Clicking this checkbox, the user will see only fresh posts (younger than 7 days).
What this will accomplish
If the two suggestions above are implemented, people will be able to reorder the posts so that the ones with most reward or most number of upvotes are on top. So you will get the presumably best-quality posts at the top. As you scroll down, you will get less popular or less rewarded posts. At the bottom will be the posts that have only a few or no upvotes, or pretty much no rewards.
As people vote on posts that have little rewards or upvotes, those posts move up and become more easily discoverable by others. The higher a post is, the more people notice it, and upvote it if they consider it good.
Notice that if only a few people upvote a given post, but these few people happen to have a lot of Steem Power, the post will appear among the top if the option to order posts by rewards received is selected. However, the post will be at the bottom when the option to order posts by number of upvotes is selected. This is a mechanism to circumvent (if one chooses to do so) the power of users with big influence. Indeed, this may potentially have a bigger impact than Hardfork 19 which gave more influence to people with less Steem Power. Ordering the posts by number of upvotes means that each vote has equal weight (!).
A yet additional thing that may happen is to diminish the importance of how many followers a person has. By making a good quality post, even a brand new user with no followers, who doesn't get noticed by influential users, can still have a good chance of reaching many people and getting rewarded.
How will this help?
Right now, a post may get some exposure at the moment it is published (publishing it makes it appear under New and in the feed of all of the post author's followers), and if someone resteems it (this makes it appear in the feed of all of the resteemer's followers). That's it. Those are pretty much the opportunities for exposure. The problem is that there is a huge gap between the posts under Hot and Trending and the other posts. In order for a post to get under Hot or Trending, it has to get a lot of attention. It won't do if it gets only a bit of attention. Crossing the threshold may be tough (especially with so many posts competing), even if the post has really good quality content.
With the reordering options I'm proposing here, there is no such threshold. Rather, each upvote gives a post an incremental push that moves it up the ladder. Moving it up means that it will get seen by more people. Even a single upvote, then, leads to more exposure for the post. As it gets seen by more people, the chances of them opening the post and upvoting it are higher. And, of course, with each upvote, the post gets seen by even more people.
But who will scroll all the way down to find posts with little or no upvotes in order to move them up in the first place?
There already is incentive on Steemit for discovering quality content. If you are among the first to vote on a post and then that post gets upvoted by many others, you receive a reward. Many people are currently perusing tons of content to discover hidden gems. By using technology to automatically reorder posts, we can make these people's lives easier, and many more may join in helping discover quality posts.
An additional way to improve their lives by having technology do the dirty work may be to implement pagination. If, for example, there are 300 posts under the tag "science" that are less than 7 days old, then this could be arranged in 12 pages or so. So a person that is looking for the posts with the least amount of votes can immediately jump to page 12 rather than scroll down and down and down.
A second and even more important reason for people bothering to look for posts with little or no upvotes is that the people who do it will be:
- discovering and voting on posts they appreciate, thereby making it a nice experience for themselves
- giving a material "thanks" to the author
- knowing that they improve the whole Steemit platform by helping quality content become more popular.
In summary
We can employ existing technology so much better to help us organize Steemit's content. This is a huge potential that we are currently not utilizing. It can help everyone on Steemit.
Also, there is a lot of manual, dirty work currently being done by people. Let machines do it instead and leave the more pleasant work to people.
And, a very interesting experiment suggests itself - to introduce a mechanism that would make each user's vote have equal weight.
And also, by implementing these changes, the number of existing followers might diminish in importance compared to the quality of the post.
What are your thoughts on this and do you think it will help?
Resteem so more people get to see these proposals.