With the invent of @yougotflagged among many other changes to this platform, the ongoing talk of the town is that there are two, huge, gut-crunching problems with Steemit.
- Spam
- Self voting abuse.
Let's identify the problems for the sake of any new readers, feel free to skip ahead.
Spam
Spam is tricky and will basically never go away, but thankfully we have @steemcleaners to deal with that to some degree. There's still accounts like @monitorcap which post automatically every few minutes, as well as comments, and many users who somehow find it logical to copy news about iPhones every day without crediting their sources.
Until humanity gains a few IQ points, this will likely remain.
Self-Voting abuse
Basically, people with high amounts of steem power either upvote their own stuff that gives them inflated value, rather than sharing the value around to the minnows and everybody else, or they rent out their power for a small fee, in a way that is only profitable if the person who rented it upvotes themselves silly. This means people are incentivized to post 1-sentence posts followed by 20 bot accounts commenting on it with 'thx' or 'gd', all of which is upvoted 3, 4, 50 dollars or whatever.
Sometimes you have a post that maybe took an hour to write and instantly receives $250. @yougotflagged was born to fight this, bringing value back to the reward pool, and it gets a bit of income from people upvoting the daily posts sharing what has been flagged.
But as long as huge whales like @blocktrades and groups like @minnowbooster exist, aside from huge programming overhauls, this is always going to be here and possibly get worse the more whales catch on to the lucrative scheme.
But here's my far more elegant solution
All my solution needs is for whales to hear about and be convinced by this business opportunity.
There are a number of growing, trusted curation teams out there. As of today, I am part of three of them in some way or another: @curie, @steemstem and @ocd. There are plenty more.
These have been around a while and have been doing nothing but a selfless service to the website by manually choosing valuable posts and upvoting them anywhere between $5 and $100, depending on if they were democratically nominated, or the level of quality or whatever.
I can tell you, being in these teams alone, ignoring the other language and country teams, a huge chunk of steemit is covered. If you post anything in Science, Tech, Engineering, Math, steemstem, medicine, chemistry, biology, physics, geology, psychology and so on, SteemSTEM has it completely covered. OCD trawls the feeds with a huge team in multiple languages. What great tools!
Simply, all whales need to do is put all their delegation into these groups, the ones they trust, and they will do the upvoting on the behalf of the community.
But the whales still need to profit
So all that needs to be added is a premium service. Rather than offer a service that guarantees an upvote worth more than they paid for, offer a service that puts them on a list guaranteed to be checked, and doubles the voting power the given curation team provides.
So if I pay $5, for example, SteemSTEM could slam 30% on my post rather than %15.
BUT ONLY IF IT PASSES THE QUALITY CHECK
If they pay $5 for the teams to upvote 1-sentence spam, they waste $5 and it goes straight to the VP of that curation account.
A whale could even offer double-premium, or triple-premium, $50 for a 100% vote, for example. In the meanwhile, the curation teams get the curation rewards, or get a guaranteed upvote on their own content as they see fit, or any similar benefit.
To Sum Up
What this means is that curation teams will grow exponentially as demand grows for their upvote services. Nobody pays for the upvotes but they can get priority. Nobody can spam or abuse self upvoting because it's entirely manual, curation teams profit, whales profit, minnows profit.
Spam and Abuse is simultaneously de-incentivized while striving for higher quality posts is strongly incentivised.
The only thing missing are clever people creating a system or app or group or whatever to organize the priority premium upvotes and the weight of votes to be sustainable, but with enough whales' backing, a 5% upvote could potentially be enough for the most premium of service.
Can anybody actually see anything wrong with this idea? I'm admittedly ignorant to the ins and outs of what goes on in the background so this could, somehow sound stupid. Please let me know if so.
It's been running around in my head and I've been pushing it to silence for over a week now. If you like the idea, please resteem it and catch the ears of whales. Perhaps we can save this site once and for all, and in a way that doesn't require months of dilly-dallying while the smart computer people figure out computery-number things they all disagree with each other on!
Cheers.