As interesting as it would be to overhaul the flagging or dislike mechanics on the blockchain itself.. I'm not sure we would be successful in coding against what is essentially a tribalistic genetic memory or human nature. A balancing or removal of the penalty or loss of curation rewards for flagging is something I'd certainly love to see tried though.
A large portion of my voting power gets used combating spammers. Creating incentive or making it profitable to engage in defending the network from asshats, scammers, spammers and the like seems a no brainer, but entirely sure how it plays out in the long run or if it's going to end up automated or what.
As for the curation side of things it's certainly possible that the way content is ranked, served and displayed certainly leaves room for optimization. One may argue that curation of new posts is nearly like finding needles in haystacks so to speak and that the majority of users have so little SP that it basically nullifies the ability of the average joe to decide what is trending.. Leaving it to a small handful of individuals whom are either early adopters, large investors or sponsored by one of the two.
As someone who's been here since nearly the beginning its certainly been noticed how the site has evolved and changed both in content quality and post counts. Naturally it may be that good posts end up slipping through the cracks as more and more posts flood in from users trying to stand out, even then "good" or "crap" content in posts is subjective.
Good post, certainly thought provoking to read your thoughts on the matter.
Your point about having only a few curators with effective voting power is one of the potentials I see for the delegation purchase business (if and only if the blockchain rewarded good curation to a reasonable level).
If someone thinks they are a good curator, but can't afford to sink a lot of money into SP (or just doesn't want to risk too much before they know how it's going to turn out), they could purchase a delegation and see how it goes. This creates more curators with the ability to move the needle on a post. But under current rules, it's not profitable to do that.
Thanks for he reply. COmpletely see the potential you see in regards to users being able to purchase or lease SP. Granted my speculation is that you'd still have to have deep pockets and or whale friend backup in order to even make a dent in the curation game. Making it more profitable to curate could help with this but may favour early adopters over newcoming authors, hard to predict fully how that would all pan out.
the early voting on posts and calling it curation is a misnomer. While it's intended to churn good posts up, we now know from experience that it doesn't necessarily do so.
Real curation is people putting their actual eyes and thoughts on the post and making a judgement call if it is a quality post or not. Those actions don't get a direct reward on the system and that is what would actually churn good posts up if those actions could be captured.
you basically stated everything i wanted to say, but far better than i could've stated it. particularly:
and
it's that last caveat that ends up being the sticking point. what's considered "good" in terms of curation when we get rid of the spam, the scammers, and asshats? it's a hard thing to quantify on that side of things.
Glad to have been able to write down how we feel / think.
At least someone read my comment, and that is half the magic of the interaction here. :)
We'll never be able to rid of all the shady spam and scam types, but we can certainly fortify ourselves against them both with technology and vigilant users.