https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/575732486655705088/622157590243180564/OCDB.jpg
@ocdb's mission has always been to support great content creators on Steem and we have pursued this mission through the bear market even as our task was made more difficult by users flocking to bid bots to maximize ROI. To continue supporting great content creators, we responded by creating a non-profit, high-return bidbot with a whitelist of proven creators. But we're excited to announce a major change in how OCD operates as a result of #newsteem.
TL;DR
-
newsteem is here and it's working
- In response to the early results of #newsteem we are switching back to manual curators!
- We are once again rewarding non-whitelisted users including users on sites like Reddit and Twitter
- We are implementing a for-profit model
- Profits from fees will be reinvested into Steem to grow the user base
- Curators will use profits to tip STEEM on Reddit and Twitter
- We will remain one of the most profitable curation projects for delegators
If you haven't noticed, #newsteem is here.
Thanks to the EIP, abusive behavior is now being dealt with. Active stake and eyeballs are again returning to the Steem ecosystem on the hunt for quality content. One consequence of this is that we can return to our original mission to actively search for and reward as many deserving users as we can. Yep, OCDB is going manual and this is why:
- Manual curators enhance Proof-of-Brain
- Accelerate the changes in behavior that the EIP encourages
- Improve manual curation or delegating to curation initiatives
- Reward valuable content creators
Because @ocdb offered the best returns for delegators and provided the most profitable votes to whitelisted users, we believe it could have survived any market. But one of the things that makes @ocdb special is that we have always put the long-term success of the platform, and userbase over profits and return-on-investment.
Whitelist Applicants
If you have applied to the whitelist, don't worry, we will be manually curating active whitelisted users without requiring bids. We believe this will increase the incentives for producing quality content because curation will be judged by manual curators looking to reward those who deserve it.
Non-Whitelisted Users
Now, whitelisted members will not be the only accounts eligible for our curation. We will also support the selections of other large curation projects. We will also be curating onboarded content creators. This has already begun through @OCD, but we will turbocharge this effort with some updates to that project and extra voting power.
With these changes, we will switch from a nonprofit model to a 10% fee that covers curators, and a 5% fee which will go into a pool used to approach and onboard content creators.
Our Focus: Growing the ecosystem
The 5% will go into a pool that will mainly be used to fund tipping. We are inviting Steem users to onboard content creators from different platforms. Onboarders will look for a good piece of content on Reddit or Twitter, comment and leave a Steem tip. We will be using Steemtipper created by @crimsonclad and @followbtcnews (Steem witness) once it's back up.
We will track their activity and they can join our discord and community to receive further curation and guidance on their Steem journey. We have seen good results and received positive feedback in our early trials. We believe this approach will help scale Steem's user base and onboard influencers from other platforms.
Communities & SMTs
This new approach will support the next phase of Steem's evolution with Communities and SMT integration. These changes are designed to empower the user base. We will still be one of the most profitable curation projects for delegators. But we hope that it is what we will actually do with the delegations to improve the health of the ecosystem and the value of Steem, that will keep you interested in continuing with us.
With #newsteem, we are finally heading toward a future with more human interaction and an ecosystem that is attractive to both existing users, and all of those to come.
@raj808 | Sept. 13, 2019, 8:43 p.m. | Votes: 9 | [
VOTE ]
Music to my ears @ocd
I know you said you would always prefer OCDB to be a manual curation entity rather than a bought vote @acidyo, but I remember you saying a few weeks ago that the time wasn't right.
> one of the things that makes @ocdb special is that we have always put the long-term success of the platform, and userbase over profits and return-on-investment.
Absolutely, and I witnessed that in how it was run and regulated. I'm glad to hear the time is right now with how well HF21/22 seems to have gone... even this cynical steemian is ready to throw his hands up and say 'it all seems to be working' 🙂
P.s. just wondering. Do whitelisted authors still need to use the #ocd-resteem tag on their posts? I've recently made a decision to stop worrying about posting daily and focus on high quality instead. Lol, so I think I'm a much better fit for curation these days.
The power of #newsteem, driving beneficial behaviour that incentivizes a focus on value adding rather than extraction. I'm pretty optimistic about steem at the moment, which is nice because it's been a while since I've felt that way.
Posted using Partiko Android
@raj808 | Sept. 13, 2019, 9:12 p.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
Cheers for the info acidyo. I won't worry about the tag unless I see an article saying different.
P.s. I know curation from any of the guilds is an occasional blessing rather than a regular thing.
I'm just glad that there are more people out there looking now, and not just from my perspective with the content I make. From a much wider perspective, one of the first things I figured about steem when I arrived was that outside of the circle jerks etc, the real driving force behind helping reward fairly were the curation guilds. This knowledge created a positive impetus to improve and develop, and once I realised that many curators take engagement into account, it encouraged me to get involved in discord communities and projects.
This story is a common one for most new steemians who actually have some talent in content creation. I see curation guilds as the vital conduit between stake that wants to be passive and the community. Well, it's the healthy way for passive stake to build the network value and hopefully the price of steem.
Anyway, I'll shut up now 🤣 I'm just genuinely enthusiastic to see this news. Great stuff!
Curation is better than vote selling.
Manual curation is (arguably) better than auto vote sniping, at least for the health of the platform.
High concentration of stake based voting in the hands of a few curators, even if voting honestly, could result in a skewed representation of content discovery and rewards that doesn't align perfectly well with what would have happened had everyone's vote weighted equally. This is the problem of bad taste.
Vote selling/circle jerking/self voting are instances of content indifferent voting behavior
Content indifferent voting is far worse than the problem of bad taste!
I wish the number one problem we need to help solve is the problem of bad taste. But that's a luxury problem not even close to content indifferent voting in terms of the harm it causes.
So going curation for a bid bot is a huge step in the right direction. That's basically as big a win as you can realistically get around here.
In our last exchange, you mentioned that if we're not abusing the system, then why should other people get to?
That's a very good point and I stand by that.
If you wish to idle and not participate in curation, then you should get the 2.25% interest on SP. Not the greatly inflated (I assume) close to but below honest curator levels of return for doing zilch.
Problems of bad taste concern me just as much as content indifferent behaviour because aside from not being mutually exclusive behaviours, I believe that in a completely honest acting platform of people, I would much rather the forces of economic incentive drive censorship resistance and not centralisation.
Censorship can be thought of as :
1-(posts and authors that are considered for curation)
Where 1 represents all posts and authors.
By concentrating more and more voting power on a non trustless subjective and un-transparent process of curation, meanwhile creating cushy "curator" jobs in the process, we are pushing more and more people off potential honest rewards whilst funding a largely for profit (but arguably less value adding) operation.
I don't support that.
The entire curation experience will always rely on one's subjective opinion. If it's at least honest, I'm happy.
I don't think the problem of bad taste is anywhere near as bad as content indifferent voting. Suppose you have 100 people effectively doing the curating platform wide. Chances are the overall result would be far better than if the system just sold votes to the highest bidder (or in some failed case here, pay the highest bidder the most to promote). Of course there a chance that 70 of the 100 curators are all nut jobs with terrible taste, but the probability of that is next to nothing. And it would probably take that many nut jobs to end up with something as bad as when bid botting completely dominates trending.
I guess if it makes you feel any better, it's much hard curating competitively if you have a lot of SP under management than if you only had a smaller stake. In other words, you can likely do better if you curated yourself strategically than if you handed your SP to a team and paid a fee. Also, as more curation projects pop up, competition over fees and performance will play a part too. There are a lot of factors that can improve the curation process over time platform wide.
I don't think it's really feasible to ask passive investors to settle for next to nothing and not allow them to delegate to curation projects. Remember, they were getting almost 100% of voting rewards delegating to bid bots (before free downvotes were a thing). Now they're getting a lot less.
Overall, even if you truly believed that concentrated stake curation is just a terrible as vote selling (which doesn't make much sense), at least now they're only getting 50% of the voting rewards rather than splitting 100% of the voting rewards between the delegator, bid bot owner and vote buyer. So overall, purely economically, it's a big win.
Of course these days bid bot returns shouldn't expect to be seeing high returns any more, with the threat of downvotes.
