Evaluating Posts on the Steemit Blockchain

Abstract

Online Social Networking platforms (OSNs) are part of the people's everyday life answering the deep-rooted need for communication among humans. During recent years, a new generation of social media based on blockchain became very popular, bringing the power of the technology to the service of social networks. Steemit is one such and employs the blockchain to implement a rewarding mechanism, adding a new, economic, layer to the social media service. The reward mechanism grants virtual tokens to the users capable of engaging other users on the platform, which can be either vested in the platform for increased influence or exchanged for fiat currency. The introduction of an economic layer on a social networking platform can seriously influence how people socialize. In this work, we tackle the problem of understanding how this new business model conditions the way people create contents. We performed term frequency and topic modelling analyses over the written contents published on the platforms between 2017 and 2019. This analysis lets us understand the most common topics of the contents that appear in the platform. While personal mundane information still appears, along with contents related to arts, food, travels, and sport, we also see emerging a very strong presence of contents about blockchain, cryptocurrency and, more specifically, on Steemit itself and its users. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Social network analysis; Social media; • Computing methodologies → Natural language processing.

Enhancing Federated Learning Security, Scalability, and Future Incentives

“…Our future work will focus on addressing the challenge of ensuring fairness in FL systems by integrating an incentive mechanism with blockchain technology. This will involve providing benefits such as financial rewards in the form of tokens, data rewards like more precise updates, or other unspecified rewards to participants with varying computational and data resources [14,15]. It is crucial to ensure that those with better resources receive additional benefits to maintain their incentive to contribute, thereby preventing capable participants from losing motivation to further engage in the process.…”

“…Blockchain technology can play a crucial role in addressing the challenges of trustworthiness, privacy, and fairness in FL. By leveraging the decentralized and transparent nature of blockchain, FL can eliminate the need for intermediaries and create a secure environment for participants to contribute their data [15].…”

Methodological Advancements in Standardizing Blockchain Assessment

“…This hybrid framework aims to bridge the epistemological gap between quantitative rigor and qualitative insight, thereby fostering a nuanced understanding of blockchain ecosystems. In laying the theoretical groundwork [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] through an examination of these two methodologies, our research responds to these challenges by introducing an innovative, dual-tiered evaluation framework. This framework synergistically combines the empirical rigor of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) with the nuanced insights afforded by a hierarchical process.…”

Hinting at the Third Path to the Future of Data Rights: An Empirical Study of the Steemit Blockchain

“…Furthermore, as studies have mainly been driven by computational approaches and large-scale data analysis, they have not sufficiently addressed the subtlety or specificity of individual productions. For example, Kapanova et al (2020) extracted topics based on written posts on the platform, but such an approach leaves room for an in-depth qualitative understanding of the different conditions and factors that constitute the produced content.…”