I noticed right now that most of the posts on my feed, at least on the first few pages that I checked have allot more up votes than views. What exactly does this mean? I am fairly new to Steem but I would assume that people are up voting posts without even reading them. I understand that many of these up votes are probably from bots.
How should Steem take care of this problem, if it is a problem at all?
Here are a few examples:
This post has 63 views but 83 up votes. Assuming every viewer voted that is 31.7% more votes than views. However I assume not every viewer voted so like much more than a third of the voters never even bothered to read the blog post.
This post received more than 3 times more votes than views.
This post has more than double the votes to viewers.
I realize that if that change Steem to only accept votes when a post is read bots will simply open the post first. So I am unsure how one would go about resolving this.
I have been thinking of an alternate voting system for a paid blogging system like Steem and I don't mind is anyone including Steemit uses this idea. The idea is that each post has a 5 star rating instead of just an up vote. You can only rate a post once the post has been opened since it does not make sense to allow votes on headlines anyway even if bots can still open the post and just vote afterwards. Of course it's not just bots that up vote without opening posts. I tried it myself when I first discovered Steemit to see what I could get out of it.
You may be wondering how that changes things. The trick is that your vote is measured against everyone else's vote. So if you vote 5 star and everyone else votes 1 star you wont get any or much curation reward as the reward must be linked to how close your rating is to others. If you vote 4 star and everyone else votes 5 star you will get some but not as much as those that voted 5 star but more than the person that voted 0, 1, 2, 3 star. 0 Star will be like reporting a post.
Another example is the average rating for a post is 4 star so those that voted 4 star will get maximum curation those that voted 3 or 5 star will get some. 1 Star voters will get less and 0 star even less or nothing.
This will encourage people to read a post and rate the quality of a post. So even if you disagree with an opinion post you might still rate the quality high because you know just voting 0 or 1 star on a good quality post you disagree with will not get you much curation. You have to think about what others will think of the post.
Of course you might think well just create more accounts to change the average. However the weight that your rating carries must still be linked to your Steem Power as it currently does so more accounts with your Steem Power divided amongst them will no give any added benefit to overall weight of a particular star rating.
One issue is that botter's will statistically analyse that maybe a 4 star rating will give them the most benefit and just always vote that. That can be countered by reducing payouts or voting power if you repeatdly vote the same star rating. It could also encourgage people to spend their voting power on lower rated posts to encourgae people to rate lower posts. A certain budget could be allocated to curation for every star rating too. So people who rate 1 star posts still get paid curation even though the post itself will not get a high payout as a result of the lower star rating.
Which brings me to that point. A posts payout will be related to it's star rating. So 1 star rated posts will receive say a fifth of the payout.
I could go on with the benefits to a voting system like this. And I know there are ways to exploit this too that must be ironed out. But ultimately I believe it will be a much better system. A good example is also the old Netflix star rating system. Where Netflix would display the rating it thinks you would rate the video. So I for see that this can also be applied to the blog posts. Show you what it thinks you will rate it so you will only see relevant posts. If you rate something 1 star it will learn from that and you feed will change to filter out similar content. This learning system could however be implemented in a future release. Initially I would not show the star rating until payout have occurred and maybe just show the vote count until then.
Please post your thoughts below. Am I missing something big? How could you fix that?