RE: How can the Steem blockchain distinguish itself in the marketplace?
I think your ideas are very interesting and think some should be very useful to stabilize the Steem and be taken more seriously by crypto world.
Yes, even returning to the 1-day payout window could be interesting especially for the users who see the Steem primarily as an investment. At this point, however, my belly ache begins:
Of course, it's hard to draw a line between "Steem for profit" and "Steem as an attractive blogging platform" or to find an appropriate balance. However, I fear that the 1-day payout window would manifest a trend that has been observed for the last 2-3 years (since "high-return-of-investment-services" and "engagement-challenge") especially among the "young boomers": blog posts as disposable items. The hunt for rewards, rewards, rewards through posting, posting, posting has become so fast-paced that it's unfortunately already the case that you write an article that you can virtually forget about the very next day. The day after the "fast voters" were all already there. With any luck, then still comment your loyal followers and deal with your contribution. The vast majority of articles are written for the latter but hardly, it is only about the fast production. That is so sad. Quality falls by the wayside, also seems hardly in demand anymore. But it is this that should make our platform attractive and unique for new interested users. But if even old hands don't pay attention to their feed anymore because it is spammed by mass production, we have failed to strike a balance at this point. Ambitious writers and readers are turning away. Is that what we want? Do we just want the quick Steem? Then we need to provide a faster payout.... :-(
So having two tiers for payouts might actually help with that, since the "fast voters" would have to choose whether to vote in the 1-day bracket or the multiday bracket. This means that manual voters might have less competition from the bots. Maybe not, but I think that the 365-day idea from @pennsif is especially interesting in that regard. To be honest, it seems to me that the attention span has always been about a day, no matter what they did with the hard forks. I'm trying to change that with some of the things I'm doing in Popular STEM, but I don't really have enough stake to make much of a splash.
I honestly don't think the payout length matters much to the quality of the content. We think that authors create content, but maybe that's not really true. Maybe it's the curators who create the content by signaling the things that they'll vote for. If a high-value curator signals that (s)he'll vote for pictures of your lunch, we'll have lots of lunch pictures. Doesn't matter if the payout comes in 1 day or 7.
But... and this is why I suggested it, a 1-day payout might draw quality producers in from the derivative chains.
On this point, my feeling is different. In the "old days" there were not so many "daily bloggers". Of those, a few were good writers, with most you quickly noticed why they blogged daily. And so it was easier to follow your feed. If I - out of interest - followed someone, I also took the time to deal with his article later (just when the time window fit with me) (actually, as I did it after the first skim now with your text). And I had the feeling that users did this also "for me". Today it often seems to me that some "mass producers" have already forgotten their article from, let's say three days ago, themselves.
Users loyal to their own work do so.
Sure. And that's what the masses respond to, and we get to read a clear majority of the same unattractive material.
Isn't that sad? And unfortunately also proof that the balance between interaction based on "social media" and pure profit thinking has been lost here.
But to return to the point of payout time. Presumably - with different points of view, a change to one day will make neither better nor worse. But we can only verify that if it is tried.
So: Courage to hardfork (after more than three years)!