Programming Diary #28: Thoughts on the problem of overvaluation

remlaps - 20 days ago

Summary

This post describes my programming activities from October 20 until today. During this time, I implemented changes to the Steem Curation Extension, finalized the latest version of the Steem Follower Checker, and resurrected one of the old visualizations that had become inoperable until SteemDB was recently brought up to date again.

The changes to the Steem Curation Extension provide a new overlay for curators to get some supplementary information on a per-post basis, prior to deciding whether or not to click into the post. A new scoring algorithm was implemented for the Steem Follower Checker.

Finally, testing of the Steem Curation Extension led me into a few days of reflections on the existence of paid voting and overvalued content on the Steem blockchain. Some of these thoughts are posted here.

Background

In Programming Diary #27, I listed (more or less) all of the major programming/development initiatives that I have worked on for the Steem ecosystem. This includes browser extensions, python scripting, LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets, and PowerBI visualizations. With all of these items to pick from and with the limited time that I have available, it is inevitable, unfortunately, that when I work on one thing, all of the other things will sit idle.

So, the big decision for every interval between diary posts is, "What will I work on"?

In the previous post, I set myself the following primary goals:

For the next iteration, I guess I'll state two specific goals:

Pick the next major direction for the SCA and start working on it.

Make some progress on delivering per-post metrics in the Steem Curation Extension

I accomplished the second, but didn't achieve the first. However, I also worked on some other stuff that I hadn't planned. So, let's look at the details.

Activity Descriptions

PowerBI

I also mentioned in the previous post that SteemDB had started updating more quickly. As a result, I was able to resurrect some visualizations that had stopped working in Q2/2023. One of the interesting pages is the 90-day summary of burned tokens and social rewards (author, curation, beneficiary). Here it is, updated through November 1:

To me, the most interesting thing here is to glance at the difference between today's graph and the last one I was able to post on September 2, 2023. The main two points that jump out at me are that:

The average total of social rewards per day has dropped by almost 550 STEEM/SP, from 55,892 to 55,351. This is not a surprise, but it's interesting to see the observation match the theory over the course of 14 months; and
Meanwhile, average burned beneficiary rewards per day has dropped by about 350, from 1,161 to 809. (note that this number is adjusted for liquid rewards, but the scaling doesn't handle 100% powerup posts right, so it's an upper boundary estimate.)

I'm not posting the other graphs today, but we see this same decline in @null beneficiaries over most of the last two quarters.

Browser Extensions

Steem Curation Extension

I added a new overlay with mouseover action for curators. Now, if you mouse over the "CURATION INFO" label in the upper right-hand quarter of a post summary, it will give you word count and information about votes from bid/delegation bots. Here's what it looks like:

Dark Mode	Light Mode

So far, I haven't spent any time cleaning the bot account list. I just slapped together a minimal list and was mainly focused on getting the functionality working. Here are descriptions of the fields:

Word count: Strips out HTML & markdown fields, and then counts the strings that are left behind. I'd expect this to be almost useless for posts in languages like Korean or Bangla, but hopefully it's not a bad estimate for posts in many languages.
Reading time: Number of words * 200 words per minute.
Bot count: Number of voters that are in the paid bot list. This runs into some challenges because some of the bid/delegation bot accounts are also voting organically, but for now they are being counted as paid votes. It's important to note that I don't intend to count curation trails or unpaid auto-voters as paid voting.
Paid percentage: Percentage of total rshares that are allocated to a post by paid voting accounts.
Organic value: The unpaid percentage times the total value.
- Total value is calculated as total_pending_payout_value + 2 ( curator_payout_value ) in order to handle values before and after payout time and to also include the post value that went to beneficiaries at payout time.

I merged the changes into the main branch on October 31, so feel free to download it or clone the repo and give it a try.

I also posted a thread, here looking for peoples' thoughts on what metrics to include. Feel free to weigh in. I plan to continue updating this.

Steem Follower Checker

As previously planned, I merged the latest changes into the master branch on October 31.

Looking Ahead

From now until 2025, I think my focus will be on 3 areas: The Steem Curation Extension, the Steem Conversation Accelerator (SCA), and the word search game that I discussed a few weeks ago. Here's the intended direction for each:

The Steem Curation Extension

So far, I have enabled the curator info overlay functionality and added post and voter information to it. I intend to follow-up with additional information about the author and the reach/strength of the author's follower network. Some of the ideas that I'm considering for inclusion can be found, here.

At this point, the main challenge seems to be the need to find a reasonable balance among usefulness, network consumption, and the size of the overlay. I'm not sure whether it makes sense to include all the information in a single overlay or to separate the four categories out into more than one overlay.

I'm also thinking about adding a checkbox to toggle the account feed between showing and hiding resteemed posts.

The Steem conversation accelerator

I'll just repeat this section from the previous post, since nothing has changed:

[x] - notifications and activity list for activities by followed accounts.
[ ] - notifications and activity list for activity in threads where the observer has participated.
[ ] - notifications and activity list for followed tags
[ ] - notifications and activity list for subscribed communities
[ ] - visibility for burn/promotion activity

Word Search Game

Basically, most this still needs to be built from the ground up. I already wrote some code that downloads a post, picks out some words, creates a word search, and then turns it into a new post. Next, I need to create a way to interact with the players to tell them when they guess the right words, and to give hints about the source post.

Goals

I can already see that my time is limited for the next two weeks, so I'm only going to set myself one specific goal for this interval, and that is to start displaying information about the author and their reach in the Steem Curation Extension. We'll see how much progress I can make.

Reflections

One of the things I noticed while testing the new overlay to the Steem Curation Extension is that I have apparently become totally desensitized to the state of the /trending page. This testing forced me to actually look at some of the posts that are sitting out there.

For example, I came across a post like this one:

console
take off
get down
get on
landing
tail guided
pitch
roll
vase
bass
garden
garment
hose
husk

That's it. That's the whole post (minus a footer). And it's valued at $84. Here's what it looks like in the overlay.

Can you imagine how a first-time visitor to the website reacts to seeing this on the trending page? I had a whole post written to whine and complain about it, but I self-censored in order to try for a more productive approach. I'll excerpt from that post in my reflections here, though.

If I am an investor, this sort of overvaluation is devaluing my stake.

If I am an author who is struggling to earn rewards by producing relevant, organic content, this is demoralizing me. If this sort of content is what dominates, eventually, I will probably respond in one of two ways:

By leaving; or

By setting up my own daily digital pollution factory.

If I am a random visitor who happens across the trending page, this is discrediting the web site and chasing me away as quick as a flash.

If I am a curator, this is reducing my inclination to find deserving content when I can just front-run the votes for the known polluters.

My first inclination is to wonder why nobody is downvoting this content? Were we so hamstrung by the Hive fork 4 ¹/₂ years ago that we have to stay willfully blind to it, even now?

Well, it's easy to see why most of our accounts aren't downvoting. There are 324 accounts that can make any impact at all on these numbers, since those 324 accounts hold almost 80% of the SP in existence.

When a fraction of a percentage of all accounts controls 80% of the influence, the idea of crowd-enforcement to control valuation is simply not possible.

This is not a complaint or a criticism. Just a description of reality.

And of those 324 accounts, how many are players in the overvalued posting game? I don't have that metric yet, but easily 10-20%, I would guess. Did you know that they even have downvote insurance now?

So, what do we do about this? Unfortunately, for most of us, the answer is that we simply can't do anything. "Suck it up, buttercup", as they say😉. But that's not a satisfactory answer, and persuasion is still possible, so let me approach this as a short term and a long term problem.

Short term

Web site operators and investors should treat this as an urgent problem. This sort of activity is harming the web site credibility and it is devaluing the investors' stake. To me, addressing both of those impacts should be an urgent matter.
Web site operators should find ways to lower the prominence of this sort of content.
Investors should look at levying a "tax" to disincentivize this sort of behavior. I'm not talking about reincarnating the downvote wars that we've seen in the past, but rather just adding some amount of friction. This might be done by downvoting the posts by a certain percentage, even as low as 1, 5, or 10% as a starting point. Given the distribution of SP in the ecosystem, Orcas, and even Dolphins can pitch in on this effort, but it probably needs to be spearheaded by whales and blue whales.

Long term

I remain convinced that downvoting is not the long term solution to this problem. We have to stop the bleeding, but we also need to rearrange the incentives.
I also remain convinced that the solution to this problem harnesses the simple idea that (rewards + audience) > rewards alone.
From these beliefs, I conclude that the most important long term need for the ecosystem is an aggressive focus on expanding the products, tools, and services that deliver attention to the creative content producers in the ecosystem.
This means, at a minimum, improving SEO, providing visibility as a service, and building bridges between Steem and the rest of the attention economy.
Fundamentally, Steem is a play at the intersection of the crypto-economy and the attention-economy. If we want a piece of content to be valued on a basis other than the size of a stakeholder's crypto investment, we have to make it possible and rational for authors to focus on audience along with rewards.

Conclusion

All three of my open source browser extensions have been updated in the last couple of weeks, so I invite you to try out the latest changes.

The Steem Follower Checker has a new scoring algorithm; the SCA has a bug-fix with its timing logic; and the Steem Curation Extension has a new overlay that provides some supplemental information about posts that appear in the various feeds.

Also, I continue to invite contributions from anyone else who wants to help improve these tools.

Finally, this post raised the topic of overvaluation of posts in the reflection section here. This is a thorny and long-standing problem in the Steem ecosystem, but ignoring it won't make it go away. Do you have any productive ideas on how to respond to the problem? Or do you disagree that it is a problem at all? Please add your thoughts.

Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

^{Pixabay license, source}

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