This is a response to 
's recent article about "People Rank" and my ensuing discussion with 
, 
and others.
My assertion is that people are Upvoting on Steemit for the wrong reasons. They are betting rather than sincerely voting.
I don't blame people for voting this way either. The incentive is there to vote for what you think will be a hit, rather than for content which genuinely appeals to you. It's hardly ideal though, nor is it sustainable IMO. This warped incentive is why we have so many posts about "why do people Upvote shit"? etc. It's not, in my opinion because people have terrible taste, it's because they are sport-voting, betting, gambling.
Here's what I wrote:
People are voting on "sure shots" for the sake of curation rewards.
It's like going to bet on a horse race, but the favourite, who has won the last 5 races, has the same long odds as the outsiders. Naturally, you bet on the favourite.
Something needs to be tweaked to encourage people to actually vote for what they like, rather than voting based on the "form" of the author.
As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the most pressing issues on the platform right now because the current paradigm is so extremely polarising. It causes a feedback loop at the top of the foodchain.
No, people are voting on "sure shots" because they don't understand the curation rewards.
He's absolutely right. I agree, for the most part, people must not realise how little reward they will get when voting late on a trending post. They still are, however, voting for the wrong reasons, and the feedback loop still occurs.
As far as solutions go, I believe Steemit needs to incentivise more sincere voting, and perhaps increase visibility of posts by "unproven" authors.
I would not be in favour of a "2 types of vote" system which some have suggested. I feel it could add needless complexity to to the users.
I'll refer to the ideal type of sincere voting as "genuine content mining" from here in. I think the system should be tweaked in the background to do one of the following:
- Incentivise genuine content mining by giving a higher ratio of curation rewards when the author has made less than X in their X most recent posts. Think of it this way; an unsigned rock band would be happy to give their agent/manager a bigger cut, for the opportunity to get their name out there.
- Incentivise genuine content mining by giving people a quota votes for under, and over, a certain threshold. For example, when you've run out of Upvotes for, say, REP 60+ authors, you can still vote, say, 20 times for authors with REP <59.
- Incentivise genuine content mining by removing the Upvote button from the listings pages. People should have to at least open the article before Upvoting it.
These are just ideas. I'm not a developer or math guy! I'm interested to know other peoples solutions, but I do know that something needs to be done if we sincerely want the best content to reap the most rewards.
I also think perhaps people should have a small allowance of flags/downvotes per day that can be cast without affecting their Voting Power. This would encourage a certain amount of dissent, which I believe it sorely lacking on Steemit at the moment.
And on the subject of visibility, I like the idea of random posts getting more visibility, but users still deserve access to the genuine "hot", and "trending" posts. Perhaps there should be a "wildcard" or "recommended" feature on the site somewhere.