Thanks for including my thoughts from before HF21. Something I can tell you is that the 50/50 split saw some amazing things happen. For the first time since I'd joined Steem, the whales felt the need to curate in order to get rewards. My average post earnings soared over the months until I would see 8-10 SBD posts several times a week and (until the SteemTron fiasco, anyway) most posts were over 1 SBD. What a huge change!!! So despite my earlier fears, 50/50 turned out to be a great thing! So, keep this!
But we still need to work to move towards a point where authors are rewarded an amount that's appropriate to the time spent. No one (in the Western world) would do a job where their reward was less than a livable wage.) That should be our goal, as a community.
That means bringing in consumers. How, is the major question there - and the 50/50 curation actually started to do some of that.
@trincowski made a really good point on a Discord server... that one of the changes made needs to be in the Witness votes. Simply put - no witness (or their other owned accounts) should be able to cast witness votes. It can stop some of the nonsense we saw with Justin Sun being able to walk in here, cast all his votes and those of his well-paid witness accounts and take over like that...
Thanks for sharing your experience. You are unfortunately in the minority of those that enjoyed regular curation.
Most took to SBI for regular upvotes but even then there is an individual or more running bot accounts that downvote people who are curated by SBI.
All I am saying is that rewards should go more to the author than curators. At least 60/40 if not 65/35.
Hope there can be a conversation around that on Hive.
I use SBI too. And actually that downvoter has now confined himself to downvoting only the purchasers, not the users. (I've had multiple downvotes from him due to my activity with @pifc - which includes buying a single SBI share for our winners.)
I agree that the author needs to be paid well (that's part of my point - that should be the main goal of the blogging blockchain.) In many ways, it doesn't matter what the percentage is as much as what the end result is. (Someone said that 10% royalty made off 100k is a lot better than 100% of nothing. - Severely paraphrased.)
For me, 50/50 curation has turned out to be good, but I hear what you're saying that not everyone has had that experience. Bringing in consumers is the only way that everyone can get paid and offering them a decent carrot can bring more rewards for everyone - if it's done right.
I still haven't really heard anyone (SteemTron, Hive or other) give any real idea of how to bring in the consumers who will feed us all long term.
With the new communities I think curation will be impacted positively so maybe we should be seeing that soon.
I want to be successful on Hive so I am really hoping that a lot gets done towards building that feeling of ownership.
It will be a rough few weeks or months to start and then the community can finally settle down into building something worth using longterm.
I remain hopeful. :-)
Something that would (I think) make curation more popular in general is eliminating the "first takes most" thing. I admit that with my 0.02 upvote, if a post is already over 1.0, I don't upvote... I'm not going to get any curation reward after all.
I will admit I have never bothered learning the technicals of curation. I just vote regardless. Would love to see how that would work.