while reading this keep in mind that I'm not speaking about this account.
When I first joined steemit, all I was thinking about was to provide quality content and help other people whom provide quality content to grow with my votes.
I did that and got my vote to a point that it's worth something, now that I have the power to make a change, I found myself voting for the same people whom often don't even provide any value in their posts.
Today i asked myself: why? what have changed?
I had a list of reasons to answer myself:
I don't have the time.
Even though, I'm spending a good five to six hours on steemit everyday, I don't have enough time to comb through tons of spam and read long posts to find those posts worthy of my vote.Everybody else is in it for profit.
bots, spammers, listers, contests, show offs, gamblers and giveaways. those whom provide original work on steemit are unicorns, don't believe me? go to your feed and try to find a post with educational value that is not about steemit and have no bot voting on it. forget that, what's your last post you've sent solely for benefiting the community?I'm in it for the money.
I'm not that different either, if there was an easy way to click and gain money for a long term solution, I would jump on it for sure, how much do you think I enjoy writing these long posts when I hate reading the same long posts?The quality have lost importance.
Nowadays, the first thing I check before reading a post is if the author does upvote the comments!
My time has value and if I'm spending it on something I expect some return, I'm not gaining anything from reading "daily bitcoin price report", that's why I only read it if there's a chance my comment gets some upvote.
unfortunately many good authors with original content get skipped by this algorithm simply because they didn't upvote comments on their past few posts.checking steemit is a chore
why do you think bots like steemvoter exist? people want to upvote but they don't want to read the posts, and that's a huge issue.
feels like those websites that you have to watch adds to get some reward doesn't it? the reason is all of that spams with little to no value getting rewarded cent by cent, because there's nobody to punish them for low quality.
I can keep going on and on but it's taking too much of my time. Now I pointed out the problem I need to provide a solution, right? the solution is simple: make down-votes profitable! right now there's no reason for users to down-vote a post. but if there was the same amount of reward for spotting and down-voting bad posts. the need for bots and spam fighting communities would shift to the need to spotting and correcting possible injustice.
we need to give a reason to people to judge the quality of content seriously and focus all of the power in spam fighter bots on punishing those who might abuse the system.
so how should it work (in my head)?
- A post with up-votes should reward the same as before (75%-25%), however a post with down-votes should reward 50% of the negative amount.
- if a posts reward is positive only up-votes get rewarded and if a post reward is negative rewards only those who down-voted.
- a posts reward can go negative only till the 3rd day, after that any down-vote won't effect the amount.
this gives the authors a protection against possible abuse and time to appeal to abuse fighting teams, also will discourage big voters from attacking others for a fast gain when there's plenty of time they can get spotted and lose their profit. - down-votes can't be removed after 3 days
this will discourage people from getting a down-vote, appealing and getting up-voted then removing the down-vote for a profit from all of those up-votes.
well it's not that easy but this can start a surge of spam hunters, and after a period of adjustment we might have an ecosystem that cleans itself to allow higher quality content thrive.
it is just an idea but I think you can ask your selected witness for their opinion on the matter. I'll do:
(I need to re evaluate my witness selection, I it looks like I just voted for top 30)
as well as my favorite spam fighters:
