scrobble.life
#theoretical

Improving the Steem platform for long-term content

@theoretical@theoretical (65)3662d

I've been working steadily over the past couple days on one of the routine housekeeping tasks that's been neglected of late, namely, getting our Github issue tracker under control -- sorting, opening, closing, and replying to various tickets. As the ecosystem's grown and matured, I've discovered a need to change my personal workflow away from the development-oriented workflow I used in early Steem days, back to the more issue-tracker-centric, maintenance-oriented workflow I used in the later BitShares days. Which, among other things, means classifying every single ticket in my personal Zenhub according to how urgently it needs my attention. So I've been looking at a lot of tickets lately.

This ticket started out straightforwardly enough, as a request to revert the change which limits posts to two payout cycles. As I stated in my reply to the ticket, the reason we decided not to do this is to reduce our memory usage and limit the working set which needs to be kept in memory by consensus nodes. I would ordinarily have closed the ticket right then, but it was generating a lot of high-quality discussion, so I decided to let it run for a bit. I'm closing it now, though, and asking the discussion to continue in the comments here.

At first, I was a bit puzzled by the degree of controversy this straightforward change created. After all, Reddit archives old posts and discussions, disabling any updates or upvotes, probably with similar technical justifications, and nobody's up in arms about it.

But I eventually figured out what's going on here.

It's been my working assumption -- and likely the working assumption of others on the development team -- that Steem is all about fresh, new content; the value of content rapidly diminishes as its age increases. Many aspects of the system -- for example, how the sorting works -- are also designed with this assumption in mind. Let's call this Type I content.

But there is another type of content. A wiki, a blog, a Stackoverflow question, or (ironically enough) a Github ticket may continue to be relevant long after it is published. Let's call this Type II content. For another ticket I asked @dantheman for his opinion on where the canonical location for build instructions should be; his answer was to place them in the source tree. This was a simple, straightforward practical question with a simple, straightforward practical answer, and neither of us thought much about it at the time. But the question we should have asked ourselves was this one: Why don't we store the build instructions in Steem? And the answer is that build instructions are Type II content, and Steem simply isn't designed for it, which meant we'd have too many annoyances if we tried it.

In short, our focus on Type I content means that Type II content is something of a second-class citizen. And the assumption that we don't care about Type II content has become deeply ingrained in our thinking, to the point where we'd stopped noticing the missed opportunities.

So here are the questions I'm going to ponder:

  • If we were designing Steem from the ground up, but we decided to design it with a focus on Type II content instead of Type I content, what choices would we have made differently?
  • What is the right path to making Type II content a first-class citizen in Steem?

I haven't even begun to properly consider these questions, but I think they're important. What do you think?

Comments · 22

  • @outtheshellvlog(62)· 3111d

    I think you're thinking of Steemit rather incorrectly =\ If a blog is type II content, and Steemit is primarily a blog site, you're essentially focusing on something that steemit isn't.

    Quite frankly, Steemit can be made to be so much more "Tumblr - Ghetto Edition" but that does seem to be the direction Steemit devs want to take it. Steemit could, however, be turned into a social media platform by integrating video, image galleries, status updates, blogs, etc into a profile.

    Take a gander at the typical Oxwall installation for sake of example.

    And the reason people don't mind so much about posts being archived on reddit vs being archived on Steemit is because Reddit, you don't get paid out for, but you do on Steemit. If I make a post that's a tutorial or informative in general, and someone finds it months down the road and find it super helpful, it doesn't stop being helpful just because it's older content.

  • @timcliff(74)· 3653d

    Hi @theoretical - I hope this isn't too off topic, but this seems to be the best way to contact people.. I'm trying to put together some info on what the Steemit dev team is up to. Is there anything you would be willing to share as far as new features that are being worked on or thought about? Also, I'm still trying to learn about the dev team / community. How are you involved?

  • @williambanks(70)· 3660d

    @theoretical My reply took a couple of days to mull over and got a bit long. I decided my problem with this approach isn't you per se, but the way this sort of thing is being handled in general. I've laid it out and proposed what I hope will be a better solution. Please consider stopping by and hearing me out. https://steemit.com/steemit/@williambanks/an-open-letter-to-the-developers-of-steemit

    Great topic! Upvoted, commented and following you now!

  • @zer0sum(54)· 3661d

    Steemit Inc has to decide what it wants to be. You are not very similar to Reddit with easily consumable Type I content (no proper search). More like an early version of Seeking Alpha (but for crypto), but with a lot of low value Type II content mixed in.

    The White Paper is not helpful, so it's Ned's job to look at the competition and say, "This is the market we are targeting". Emphasis on focus and target.

    Steemit could probably be a serious threat to Seeking Alpha within months because you can pay their financial market writers more, but you need to be friendly to a Long Tail of Type II content with a page views metric.

  • @steemrollin(69)· 3661d

    I agree with @markmorrisjr @stellabelle @sunjata @johnsmith @akareyon.

    I think it's extremely important to find a way to make posts, comments & payouts timeless, because good content is timeless. SEO is slow so I imagine some of these posts are going to draw backlinks, major new traffic and new users. Type II content is incredibly important for long term sustainability and engagement and probably more important than Type I content. Recency is mainly important for news and discussion on recent events, but we don't have that much of that. We're also going to have too much recycling if we focus on Type I content.

    Conclusion: Finding some way to continue long-term discussions and reward long-term content is crucial.

  • @akareyon(59)· 3661d

    I am more than glad to hear that you are having these thoughts and realising the potential value of timeless posts, the "Moby Dicks" and "Iliads" of our time. It will be a huge incentive for those who don't just spend hours, but days and weeks on their thoughts and are reluctant to "produce for the trash bin".

    How could it be implemented? Can Type I and II always be discerned upon conception?

    If it is possible to adjust the payout time from 24 hrs to 12 and back and add one for the month, I imagine it is technically feasible to make it so that even years later a post - a classic which OOTL noobs constantly need to be pointed to for example - can catch an upvote still. Or maybe a "nouveau riche" powerful user stumbles over something valuable in the archives next year, maybe the Gini coefficient becomes more reasonable as reasonably active readers catch up on a 500-page Steemit webcomic...

    Why not allow weekly or monthly... "pensions"? Nothing needs to be taken from anywhere else, just as the 30-day payouts don't "take from" the 12/24-hr payouts perceptibly and just leave away the whole curation award calculation, if I understand correctly: the ratio Type I/II upvotes will probably exceed 1 by far due to the curation incentives alone. No new module needs to be invented, no new pedestal be chiseled, just a restriction needs to be lifted, it seems...?

    That announcement alone would already have made me quite curious and happy :) Who asks for much?

    But now that you ask what it should be like to concentrate on such content first and foremost...

    ...then one form of curation would be for some, myself included, in becoming archivars, data snorkels, archaelogist who dig deep into the forgotten and lost to unearth gems and treasure of never beheld beauty.

    It does not have to be the same scheme as in the 24h run, but let's say a mole finds this 5-year old heart-gripping soul-ripping post that sat at 4 upvotes and .02 $ all the time and it suddenly explodes over the next few weeks, this digger objectively did some great work.

    That would be my first thought, I think.

  • @dantheman(73)· 3662d

    Theoretical's statements regarding memory usage being the primary consideration are not fully on point. The primary consideration is the "attention of the masses". The overall security of the voting platform depends upon all things that can get voted upon being rewarded.

    There are two fundamental use cases for Steem... content and currency.

    Exchanges, merchants, etc need the ability to run nodes that are fully up to date on the economic state of the platform without respect to the social media side of the platform.

    The sooner content can be separated from having financial consequences the more efficient the platform becomes for financial applications. It is financial applications that ultimately give the platform value many times that of other social media networks.

    Posts that are eligible to receive payout need to keep track of "votes" and all other information relevant to the post. Removing the financial rewards associated with a post is sufficient for freeing things from memory. Those that wish to have a meta consensus above the economic consensus can.

  • @arcurus(50)· 3662d

    ¨the reason we decided not to do this is to reduce our memory usage and limit the working set which needs to be kept in memory by consensus nodes.¨

    @theoretical can you please give more details / an example / some numbers for this statement.

    The text itself is static and could be stored in the Interplanetary File System. So the question is what is about the consensus? Is it that expansive, if so what part?

    Just as suggestion: Couldn't rewarding content be the same way implemented like a simple transaction? Like every day you can distribute 0,1% of your ¨inflated¨ steem power to articles payed out in steem dollars. Steem Power that is not be distributed after 30 days is evenly distributed to all active participants. Self / sybil voting is visible through the transparency of the blockchain. Participants that do self / sybil voting could therefore be flagged.

    For example you have 100 Steem Power. If you dont vote for 10 days you have 100 * 0,1% * 10 = 1 Steem converted to steem dollars worth to distribute. If 50% of the Steem power holder do not take part in voting, you have 2 Steem to distribute. With the vote itself, a part of that could be instantly transfered to the owner of the article. No need for any further consensus. If one self votes, the account itself could get flagged. With every flag the steem power to distribute could be the same way reduced like an upvote would have given. Both the flagger and the flagged person loosens therefore equally steem to distribute, that could be distributed from others.

  • @markrmorrisjr(71)· 3662d

    I realize that I have contributed a lot to the "complaint" side of the conversation, without suggesting much in the way of a solution. I won't go into it on this thread, but if anyone wants a bigger perspective, here is a post I did about it that got quite a bit of attention. I also recognize there is still potential for me as a writer to make good money and use the platform in other ways, I talk about it here

    Here are some thoughts on going forward.

    • I think there could be a threshold for number of votes under which content could be archived, without future payout. I would be fine with my $0 posts going there. I have 30 days to promote and make them profitable, after all.
    • Ad revenue sharing sites provided a mainstay for many writers for almost 10 years, and they are now finding their sites have dried up, due to changes in Google. Perhaps a look at some of these models, where articles provided revenue for years would be beneficial
    • Provided bots and upvoting from related accounts could be prevented to stop "mining" old content, I think the argument of older content being in competition with newer content is irrelevant. How would that even work? There is no current mechanism for months old content to be promoted, unless the author hustles to share it, which means new traffic, which is good.
    • Creating a home for writers is wise. They will settle in, cheerily cranking out the content the site needs, on whatever topic will please the audience, at a high level of quality, as long as they get some reward from it. Most would get a raise, if they even approached $1000 a week.
    • Writers and bloggers also know content promotion and will build mad backlinks to achieve more views in the hopes of getting upvotes. Their combined marketing savvy is huge. It helped make Facebook a household name.
    • Since it is unlikely, given the current promotion scheme, that without new traffic, old steemit content would contend with normal views at all, making it a serious source of new users.
    • In addition to writers, another market that could easily be tied into is the "work at home" crowd, if revenue is ongoing.
    • I don't see a need for a separate place for this content, since only the content that is receiving votes would show up in the category it was posted to and why would you not want that? There are already filters for "new" to please those who don't do "day old"
    • The increased number of new users, traffic, and engagement would surely make up for whatever cost there is involved with making it technically possible. Perhaps even ear mark a portion of those revenues specifically for that purpose?
  • @nonlinearone(66)· 3662d

    Regarding your questions: what happens when someone updates a post within the first payout. Is the entire post reposted to the blockchain or is it a patch? I imagine something like RCS on the blockchain being useful for maintaining content that people want to edit for long periods of time.

  • @nonlinearone(66)· 3662d

    Also, if you study Pinterest pins, you will find that many continue to be popular LONG after they were originally pinned. Evergreen content is the best kind.

  • @nonlinearone(66)· 3662d

    By the way, I made this post about wanting to be able to comment on a year old Reddit post two days ago https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@nonlinearone/not-to-say-i-told-you-so-but-or-why-i-wish-i-could-reply-to-posts-a-year-later

  • @nonlinearone(66)· 3662d

    "the value of content rapidly diminishes as its age increases" Citation Needed. :)

  • @stellabelle(76)· 3662d

    I agree with several others here. As a writer and producer of content, I have noticed that when someone discovers my work, they do a backlog reading of it. If they are unable to comment, that is very bad. It reduces this site to the casino style experience that hardcore readers dislike. The more intelligent crew will not like that the backlogged articles are in the dead zone. You basic nullify value that existed once. It's a very short-sighted, bad idea to think of Type 2 content as dead.

  • @samupaha(67)· 3662d

    I've been thinking for a while now that Steem could have more than one blockchain. Each blockchain would have different reward system to encourage different types of content. The blockchains would be sidechains so that SD could be transferred from one chain to another.

    I know that Steem operates with the assumption that it's bad to collect transaction fees from users. But an idea just popped into my mind: if somebody wants to have more than two reward payments for the post, he could have more by paying for them. If additional reward rounds increase the memory requirements, it's not feasible to allow them... but if somebody wants to pay for it, why not? Probably not that many posts would have more than two reward payments so the memory requirement would stay moderate.

    What is the right path to making Type II content a first-class citizen in Steem?

    Is it in any way feasible and reasonable to have several different content types with different reward mechanisms in one blockchain? It would help a lot if it was possible to help one kind of content without harming other types.

  • @prufarchy(69)· 3662d

    With this type of thinking, we'll have Type II content getting some more attention as it deserves.

  • @tee-em(62)· 3662d

    I am writing series that can be referenced for the long haul, as I see Steemit as a long play. From parenting advice with pics, citations and studies to financial alternative investments, my posts will have the goal of long term sustainability. Upvoted and following! https://steemit.com/money/@tee-em/get-rich-during-crisis-how-to-arbitrage-bitcoin-silver-gold-and-other-assets-to-maximize-profits-during-collapse-part-1

  • @johnsmith(64)· 3662d

    The value of content should not drop to zero simply because it has passed the payout window. There will likely be hundreds of thousands if not millions of new members reading 'old' content in the coming months and years. To me it would make sense to have the 24hr initial payout and then monthly payouts... forever. Why not? If I read an 'old' post and get some value from it, I upvote it and know the author will get a small reward. This could become a defining feature of the Steemit platform - permanent income streams! It would be huge, absolutely huge for content creators.

  • @markrmorrisjr(71)· 3662d

    I think it should be heavily considered. There are platforms such as wattpad, where writers slave for free, cranking out fiction that draws a lot of traffic. They are getting $0 from their efforts there, unless they sell books through their links to other places. A site like what Steemit appeared to be when I looked into it would provide, exactly what Steemvixen described three fold revenue that could feed a writer from one site. That potential is huge. I am a member of a single Facebook Group of writers where the population of that one group is larger than the user base of Steemit. If done correctly that could be migrated here, and they produce content, that is pretty much their only function. If you could figure out how to do it, my friend, you guys could compete with publishers such as Amazon, and the readers themselves could even earn from comments and reviews. The potential is huge, there are literally over ten thousand groups labeled "writer" on the Facebook platform with more than 1000 members. That's just one social network, one that many writers don't even belong to for purist reasons. I think you should carefully consider making this work as the potential upside among writers, video content producers, musicians, and photographers could explode this thing, and many artists are already agoristic in their views and prone to trying and accepting new things.

  • @steemvixen(28)· 3662d

    I know I contributed to the thread you are referring to. As a professional writer, having residual income is gold. Even if it's only a few cents a month, over time, the steady stream of income makes the ups and downs of the writing life livable. The problem I have with content not getting paid more than twice is two fold. First, it's not what was going on when I got here and I saw that residual as a huge draw. I understand why it might not have been in the forefront of your thinking. That's neither here nor there, just a preference. The second is more troubling for me. That is the fact that the system keeps my content in perpetuity, where it can be used in the future, long after I may have left the platform for greener pastures. It adds to the organic gravity of Steemit as a URL, and thus is contributing to the bottom line, since over 14% of the sites traffic is coming through content searches. That means that as a writer, I am contributing to every new signup, every share, and every time the site comes up in search, because my work adds authority to the pool. I understand that my SP grows with the site and in some sense, if things go well, I do get a continuing source of revenue, but that content may essentially be dead to me now. With writers, our content is what we build to sell. Much of it gets sold for one money, one time, and that kind of work we have to continually seek and do. The other, more valuable kind provides streams of residual income, like I said, albeit small, they add up quickly. A writer like myself contributing 4 pieces per day would have over 200 pieces of "property" on the site. Not all of them would produce continued upvotes, but many could. If 1/4 of them produced $1 in revenue per month, that is $50 per month, compounded over 5 years, that's $250 per month and if I develop my audience correctly, I can do much better. If I hit at 75% continuous revenue generation, that would mean $150 a month after the first year. Coupled with the immediate payouts and investment potential, this makes your platform a very attractive home for writers, who might never need go anywhere else if they can develop enough of a following.

  • @mark-waser(57)· 3662d

    I think that you're making the mistake of conflating the SteemIt platform with the underlying Steem infrastructure. I wouldn't change Steemit to make Type II content a first-class citizen -- I'd develop another platform (re-using the appropriate code from SteemIt liberally) with an easy method to "archive" appropriate long-term content from Steemit after 30 days.

  • @erroneous-logic(48)· 3662d

    I think that I can't come up with a way to sort out how to reward the fresh new content AND keep up rewards for relevant reference style content at the same time. I am, of course, not the knower and sayer of all, so perhaps someone else can come up with a way. It might require a second platform entirely.