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RE: Whales - Can the community buy out a portion of your influence?
Was going to ask this question myself. If all curation rewards go away, that would make me sad because I earn a lot of curation rewards. On the other hand, I've never been sure that Steem needs curation rewards in any meaningful way, so I'm probably ok with getting rid of them.
Well, to be fair, no social media platform needs to pay people for posting. We know that millions (billions?) of people do it for free every day.
But as long as this platform is centered around payments and investments, then it makes sense to appeal to more than just bloggers. In fact, I would argue (and do argue) that there needs to be more incentive to attract readers and voters to Steemit. Content consumers are an exponentially larger market than content creators. If you want Steemit to grow, you need to attract people who will actually read, vote on, and share the content. So, rather than eliminate curation rewards, they should be increased - at least back to the 50% reward that they initially were.
Any plan that eliminates curation rewards is dead in the water, as far as I'm concerned. There's already practically no incentive to hold SP. Eliminate curation rewards and there is in fact none.
@ats-david I do agree with your point regarding the need to attract readers, but I would respectfully disagree with the suggestion that increasing curation rewards would increase readership. What it absolutely would do is increase voting bot activity which does not create engaged readers entering the platform. Some authors have already written about the shady nature of the number of upvotes (in some cases) far exceeding the number of page views on a post and how the outside writing/publishing world will view that. I think the idea of increasing the rewards for commenting has a much better chance of bringing a larger and more engaged readership to Steemit.
Personally, I am on the fence about the curation reward system. When a small pool of individuals hold a disproportionate amount of voting power, the system as a whole will break.
The end goal of curation rewards (as I understand it) is to reward individuals who spend time and effort to discover good content , upvote it and increase its visibility and separate it from the content which is not excellent, plagiarized, etc. When voting power is pooled and concentrated so severely into the hands of a select few, then the content only becomes what they and/or their proxies decide it will be and curation as intended does not exist. I think this is a large reason for the exodus of quality authors who do not write content for the more popular tags.
I don't think treating whales as Preferred Shareholders and removing their voice from voting on content is entirely fair either. If I took tremendous risk and put in my own time and resources into a company, I would want both a Return on Investment and a vote. What is very transparent is the voting system is incredibly broken. I would suggest rather than eliminating voting power above a certain threshold, perhaps geometrically reduce the power of each additional 10,000 vests or so. This way returns can be had, voting power can be increased, but the rate of increase is drastically reduced and allows the field an opportunity to have a true voice and impact with their vote. It would also encourage more to build STEEM power, because it becomes an attainable goal with real rewards of vote power.
My $0.02 anyways.
My two biggest issues with curation rewards are:
The idea isn't to "earn anything significant." The idea is to earn anything at all. This is one of the most common misconceptions about this platform - that everyone should be earning a bunch of money for doing menial tasks with little investment. As far as I can recall, that's not what STEEM/Steemit is all about. It's supposed to be a way for people to earn a little bit of cryptocurrency for doing what they would normally do on other social media sites. This isn't supposed to replace everyone's full-time job.
So, with that in mind, if you're earning a few SP every week by simply upvoting posts when you read them, then you're doing much better than you normally would on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or pretty much any other platform in existence, where you earn precisely nothing for doing the same thing. What can we call "significant" earnings in relation to that? Maybe five SP per week? Ten SP? Fifty?
I think we tend to lose sight of what this place really is and that probably has to do with how posts were being paid out in the first couple of months. Not everyone is going to earn thousands of dollars per post, or hundreds of dollars per post...or even tens of dollars per post. But, if you're earning something from posting and curating, then you're doing great compared to the major social platforms that are most widely used.
Curation alone isn't going to promote user engagement. You get engagement from an active user base and engaging content. We don't have the former and the latter is quite scarce around here - and mostly due to the tiny user base.
@snowflake I disagree with you that "Steemit is about rewarding content creators". If you read the white paper, rewards are supposed to be for all valuable contributions, not just "content". The former includes voting.
I agree with @ats-david that the curation rewards should be increased and, if they were, a lot more users (not just bloggers) would be getting significant rewards on a regular basis and would be more enthusiastic about the system and in turn telling more of their friends (also not just bloggers) why they should sign up. The cut from the original design has not just been by 50% but more like 75%, and this has had a devastating impact not only on the incentives to buy SP but also the incentives for non-bloggers to join and participate at all.
The other changes I would make to curation rewards are to make them less top heavy (by generally making rewards less top heavy) and to make them less front-loaded meaning reduce the share that is earned by the first votes. All voters should get a share (early voters can still get a bit more). Both changes would reduce a lot of the current incentives to run curation bots. If early voters on the best (by far) paying posts didn't get such an enormous share of curation rewards, more of the curation rewards would go to ordinary voters.
That is one goal. It is not the "primary" or only goal. Curation is indeed an important factor and we know that the original split in rewards was 50/50 for content and curating. Voting incentives are just as important to the goals of STEEM/Steemit as content creation are.
But as I said - the market for content consumption is exponentially larger than that for creators. The user base can expand much more and much more rapidly by incentivizing readers and voters just as much or more so than content creators.
Based on what data? If you have no incentives for readers and voters, why would they care to buy in, power up, and spend time curating? How many people do you think will pay to use social media, which is free on many more user-friendly and wildly more popular sites and apps?
Not everyone is a blogger. And if you have only a community of bloggers, it will likely be small and the bloggers will likely spend more time on creating than they will on curating.
You make some really good points, and I agree with pretty much all of them. With that said, I still think that the actual way curation rewards play out in practice is not good for the long-term growth of the platform.
And from more rewards for comments (which is coming)
Steemit is about rewarding content creators, that's the primary goal of steemit. More content creators will earn rewards with a proposal like this, it is totally aligned with steemit's objectives.
That is currently impossible to do on steemit !!!
Why? Because UX is ages behind FB (or othe platforms) for example...
Maybe eventually that is the major problem we have... It's difficult for the average Joe to feel comfortable like on other social media platforms!
PS And in my humble opinion that is why bitshares exchange is still not successful . Very bad UX compared with centralized exchanges!
One way to fix this is to reward more curation rewards for post that are above average rewards for a author and less if it's below average for a poster. You his last ten post. This would be hard for people voting author list to game.
It's an interesting idea but it actually starts to make the blockchain calculations quite complicated.
Assuming you are talking about the comment reward pool.. this pool will be completely unnecessary if curation rewards are removed.
Replying to below.
Would it be more complicated than reputation? I am thinking of a field that averages the last ten or twenty paid out post. If payout is greater than the number that is attached to each user name curation is slashed or boosted.
Yes.
The problem of current curation reward system is no association with engagement and therefore vulnerable to bots. Why do bots matter? Because bots cannot analyze, rate, or filter content by its quality. For instance, if I ask you about your upvotes on posts, you maybe able to tell me reasons why you value them, and your curation created value. If I ask the same question to bots, they cannot answer why the posts are good.
If we want to keep curation rewards, we need to integrate user engagement to it, as I suggested in my post. If not, I agree that curation reward is doing more harm than good.
This:
Is factually incorrect. There's an entire Internet search and advertising industry that has emerged in the last 20 years by doing exactly that. Steem bots may not do it very well, yet, but after some development time, they will. Bots are just a continually improving approximation for their operators' own preferences.
Their operators can.
I'd argue that quality content is what attracts readers and voters, not the rewards.
People aren't reading medium or reddit because they're rewarded, it's because they both have tons of quality content and good communities built up around them.
I do agree that we need to add more incentives to holding SP - but I don't agree with keeping a broken system because it's viewed as the only reason to hold.
Medium pays writers and is failing. Reddit is mostly unpaid writers and is doing fine. People write for free and are paid in reputation. No need to pay them anything of value.
Right - medium has it's own set of problems, which have nothing to do with curation or readership. They failed to find a viable business model to keep paying writers. Also, not all writers on medium are paid, you can go signup and start writing right now if you wanted. They attract non-paid bloggers through an extremely polished and easy to use author experience, and then authors go out and promote themselves on other platforms.
Luckily it'll look a lot more like reddit (I hope) once we get communities here sometime this year.
Sure, quality content is great. But what does that mean?
I would also argue that excellent UI development and actual marketing would also attract people. We're still waiting on those to play out.
Posted via busy :)
It means content that people actually want to read :)
Amen. I'm right there waiting with you and exploring ways to try and help. There's only so much we can do from the outside to impact those factors though.
Replying to comment above
Sybil depends on a cheap entry price. A $6000 entry price won't lead to Sybil. If they do split their accounts it's more management time and record keeping for them and they are just back where they are today. I don't think we should worry about that.
Not necessarily, people already have these amounts.
An account with 1000MV could spend 125 STEEM to create 5 accounts, and then transfer 200MV into each account. Each of these accounts would now be eligible for curation rewards with approximately the same weight as a 1000MV account.
The entry price wouldn't change.
Bingo. Paying for content is stupid . There are oceans of free content. The valuable thing is sorting through bad content to find good content. Discussions are also nice. That's why almost all rewards should go to curation and comments
It is very debatable if the paid curation model actually incentivizes the "good" content to bubble up to the top. It favors picking "winners" which are based on a lot of game theory factors, many of which do not actually deal directly with quality or user engagement.
I do think if steem distribution was better and the exponential was less than 2 it would improve the functionality of the "bubble up" but it's just a theory until tried. Maybe the old 5 full power votes a day would work too.
You got it backwards, curation rewards reduces the number of readers and voters.
Based on what data that can corroborate this claim?
More users with influence means more readers. Also look at the comment section, barely anyone is voting.
Can you elaborate on this?
Sure. There are lots of reasons for that. One of them is that it doesn't pay much to vote on comments. There's not enough incentive for many users.
More influence, means more inclusion, more involvement, more activity and ultimately more reading. If curation rewards are removed everyone will vote manually which will lead to a lot more reading too.
[nesting]
@ats-david
You have two things you can vote on:
You also have a finite amount of votes to maximize your total curation rewards. This leads people to vote primarily on Posts, so they earn more rewards.
If you were to eliminate curation rewards, then there's no difference in voting on a post or a comment, which would lead to an increase in votes on comments, which would lead to more comments...
That's my train of logic, not sure if it's solid or not yet, but that's where I'm at :)
Curation rewards are only unique thing about steemit. It's also the only reason to power up.