After seeing @heimindanger latest post in relation to the bot situation, I felt it was time to write a good post about myself and talk about what it is to be a curator and latest heimindanger's post. Let's start of with DTube.
All good things must come to an end.
As some of you know, I operated with the curation team with DTube and I must say, working as a full time curator is a very hard job. Technically the job itself is simple but the role you have in the community can not be overlooked. You are constantly challenged to figure out if the content being reviewed, should get a vote and you have to judge upon previous content which may have not got a vote. As I do not operate as a DTube Curator anymore, I am not able to speak of the guidelines which was set upon us curators.
What advice I can give to content creators as of this time is simple.
- Quality is King. There is no other way to go about it. If you don't have the time to make something worthwhile, you'll not be given a chance at all.
- You are competing against other content creators. If you've made great content, that's fine but if someone else has made better content, you are now directly competing against them to make your content worth DTube's upvote.
- Only so much quality is needed. Whilst I do state that quality is king, the actual content is what we care about. Be creative, talk about things which are interesting and make things sound awesome.
In the same time, just because you're creative, does not automatically constitute a vote. I would like to remind you what DTube is. It's a video platform. They're showing the best videos which is enjoyable to watch. DTube wants people to come onto the site not to always vote or create content but to consume. To be an alternative to Youtube despite the growing pains. To find content which they wouldn't find elsewhere but to stay because the content is worth watching. A curator must remind themselves that the content they are upvoting, is a vote to decide what they feel is good to watch. If you see something in the DTube frontpage, that is stuff they feel that people will enjoy to watch. It's gotta look good, feel good, sound good and be good. If someone is creative but doesn't have the suitable video quality, grainy picture but is a fantastic artist, the lack of the other components takes away from said video. DTube can give advise to said video creator but other than that, it's up to the video creator to take such measures.
DTube is a web business and must operate like one. It is very easy for a web business to try to cater for the community all the time but there comes a point where the community most work to what the business aims to do. My failure comes from here and I'm happy to admit that and I resigned as a curator after fully grasping this. Strong words was needed against me and in this case, it was rightfully so.
I aim to work with DTube in different ways now. I feel pride with working with DTube as a curator but my time has ended on that front but I will find something else to do. It might seem like DTube doesn't care for it's content creators but I can absolutely state this is not the case. It must operate as a business but it's business is the sum of it's people and therefore it's focus must always cater to them in the long run. If you have patience, you'll find it'll be rewarded in the long term. I have absolutely full confidence in the DTube Dev team, to continually work out problems and make the best video platform in the world. I hope I can be apart of this again but as a programmer.
I learn things slowly, but I will become a Javascript/jQuery frontend programmer
This has been a challenge for years but as I've said before, I've only recently made the real push into all things programming. It generally takes me a longtime to learn something but when I learn it, I have full confidence in my understanding of said subject. It is therefore why it takes me a long time to learn anything to do with Javascript. There is A LOT for me to learn. Saying that, I've now learnt the good strong basics of Javascript and jQuery and I'm looking to push into AJAX and JSON which both Javascript and jQuery leverage upon.
I'm very busy throughout the days with my father. Having to cook, take care of the house and many other things but with my heavy reduction of playing games "I started to play about 3 games a day with friends" I've got a lot of time to learn. It's going well and I'm happy with my progress. If there was a fear on my side, it would certainly be that with all the time I'm putting into learning all of these resources, that it actually comes to good use. Slowly but steady I guess.
As I've said, I would love to work on DTube as a developer in the future so I have better long term possibilities however I would probably work on the opensource side of things first. I also have a small project in the past that I worked on as a marketing guy which with new programming skills, could open up the project again! I'm looking forward to working on that project as a side thing as it caters to my interest. One project which I'd like to learn more about is Utopian.io which seems like a great thing for new programmers to look into. Steem caters to giving people feedback so this could be very good for me.
Trash control. It's needed
I am very happy for Heimindanger to push the trash control tool. It is absolutely needed and for those that try to defend botting as a form of advertising have absolutely no idea how curation should be operating. It is actually very hilarious to me and therefore I shall now explain why it is for me.
We understand that Steemit operates somewhat like Reddit. Steem can be used for many of things but in this case, Ned and his team made Steemit as a proof of concept for Steem. Now as Steemit is very much like Reddit, the comparisons can be made and I will now employ them for this subject.
I have read many and many of people try to claim that the bid bots are a good thing when whales are so powerful and the logic is sound but fails in application to Steem. See the rewards which you can see from every post, is what gives the notion of value. The higher it is, the notion that the content is actually worth that much. This is however a failure because crap content can be voted to the top if for some reason, a rich whale thought it was worth it. Therefore without even applying bid bots into this situation, the idea that the value of the content comes from it's rewards, is a silly idea because it can't as any bad critique could vote on any content and sky rocket it, if they pose the funds. It's like giving a kid a lot of money and deciding on what's the best movie to watch at the time. That kid doesn't have the real ability to discern what's a good movie or not but if the money were to decide it, he'd get his way versus people that don't have said funds.
Now if we add bid bots to the situation, you can obviously tell there is huge issues with this. A person who might believe they have great content, is going to elevate that content using curation manipulation "that is exactly what it is" and because people see the value as it being higher than other content, people are going to start believing that the content is worth reading/watching/consuming. This is clearly not the case because the user is simply paying for promotion and the rewards therefore do not represent it's actual quality.
When you see how much content is valued at, it's meant to be an organic way to determine if the content is good or not. If the content has more value behind it, it is meant to be an indicator that the content is great to watch or has been already judged voted that it's worth watching. However by using vote bots/ bid bots as a means to manipulate the notion the content has been judged and is worth looking at, is immoral and unfair. Yes it is also UNFAIR. It is immoral because you are now lying that the content has been judged correctly but rather has been paid for which is rigging the system to your benefit and the bid bots make money out of this via the Steem mechanics for rewarding content curators.
Therefore when using Bid Bods, you are lying that the content is as good as it should be only because you want the content to be seen. The logic is sound but because the mechanic being used is manipulated, it is now immoral. Therefore voting down this content on this alone to the value of how much it was voted up for via the bid bots, makes absolute sense to me. Your content must be as good as what other people have judged it and though it's certainly not a perfect system, rigging system for your benefit certainty doesn't help.
It is ALSO UNFAIR. In the Esports scene, a lot of journalists were using their Twitter following to go to their Reddit posts which would forward the user to the content. This made no sense because the Twitter user could have simply tweeted to the actual content if it lived somewhere other than Reddit. It was fairly obvious the journalists were trying to leverage on their Twitter followers to upvote content because of the user rather than the content itself and also it made no sense for people to have to go through Reddit to then go to the content. Made no sense and I made sure it was known to Reddit because it hit upon the LITTLE GUY. See the little guy might have made AMAZING pieces of content but because they did not have the following behind them, their content would be shafted because they didn't have enough people to see their content on Reddit. Why? Because they didn't have people to go onto their Reddit posts to upvote to make sure their content was on Trending or even rising. This was simply very unfair.
To bring this back to Steem, if we keep going the way we are going, people are going to use more and more money to vote on these bots to immorally upvote their content. What happens if you don't have enough money? Well you won't be seen and that's simply not fair. Steem is a platform where any content depending if it's amazing, can be put to trending if judged well and gauged well. To think that because other people have paid to manipulate their own content rewards worth, to make people feel their content is good, makes it unfair for those that actually make amazing content but is ignored because literally trash content, get the attention. This is why it is unfair to use bidding bots.
I am absolutely for the plans which @heimindanger is pushing out and I actually, would be far harsher thank him. Any form of vote bidding usage, 1%, 2% whatever, should be removed from the post. If a person pays for their content to be artificially manipulated, that person has already determined that they want their content to be advertised and that is technically fine BUTbecause they are not being honest about the amount it has been upvoted by a bot, "see an advertisement is labelled which is not happening here" they automatically become immoral and unfair to the Steem blockchain and I feel should be penalised for the amount they try to upvote for, therefore making it pointless for the content creator to pay for upvotes. There is literally a promoted section for all things advertising. This needs work.
In the same time, a person might not be using the bid bots service as a means of advertising but as a means of manipulating the curation system to pretend that their content has been voted legitimately and so for people to think the content is worth reading. This is absolutely unacceptable. To use the bid bots as advertising mechanisms serves the same purpose and therefore both situations must be treated the same. It's either all okay or not okay and simply both are not okay.
Therefore I am absolutely behind Heimindanger and his trash control and hopefully more and more people can be also. SmartSteem does grade their content creators and I absolutely understand this but they are being paid to upvote content. The content is not being judged for it's value and therefore is vote manipulation of value. If SmartSteem had to go through each post itself and judge it, I would have absolutely no problem with the service but they are simply not. They are not operating as curators and from my time in DTube as a curator, I know for a fact the job is hard and they wouldn't want to do it. The team I worked with did it because we believed in the project and I still do.
Steem has to evaluate it's way of allowing people to evaluate content because Whales have too much power to sway the thoughts of people. I can literally go to the bank, get £5,000,000 worth of steam and vote for meh content each day. The value of my upvote will sway people to think the content is okay because of the investment. A legit whale might vote fairly for the best content but because there is confusion here, the system is therefore broken imo. I have faith in the Steem team to fix this.
That's enough from me, you can find me on the DTube Discord as Coldbolt if you would like a chat or talk here but this really is my thoughts I wanted public.