RE: How can the Steem blockchain distinguish itself in the marketplace?
@chriddi dreams that here on Steemit people will post rarely but very cool. It is a utopia worth striving for, but one we will never be able to achieve.
We may not be able to achieve that utopia on the blockchain, but all we really need is a front-end/dapp that makes it easy to find these types of authors and filter the others out. I want to see all kinds of content getting posted (except spam, plagiarism, illegal content, etc... of course), but have an interface that lets the audience control what they see. So Utopia happens at the front-end, not on the blockchain. ;-)
STEEM Representatives were elected today.
Congratulations on being included!
To combat spam, changes need to be made so that, under certain conditions, curation is more profitable than writing posts. A new algorithm for calculating curation fees is needed. Before I joined here, I understand that curators were getting 75% of rewards for a while. I'm not sure why they changed it, but that strikes me as preferable. If it's one author sharing with tens or hundreds of voters, a 50/50 split seems off-balance (and when I first came here, curators were only getting 25%!)
I definitely agree with this. I think the overvaluing of posts is as big of a problem for the ecosystem as when they're undervalued. But, as you said, the people who could make the change don't have the incentive to do it, because (aside from Steemit) they're benefitting from the flaws in the current algorithm - at least in the short term.
So, we're left with individual curators acting in their own spheres of influence: "accept the things I cannot change and change the things I can." ;-) Which is why I proposed item #4. Definitely, CSI, reputation, and followers could be factors in that sort of a quality measurement. Similarly, I seem to remember that someone once used the total SteemPower of an account's followers as an alternate reputation score... maybe it was the people behind busy.org (when it existed)... not sure. The logic was that if lots of people with lots of SteemPower follow you, you're probably saying something that's worth listening to.
Thanks, it's actually a big responsibility and I don't know if I can be useful to the platform without enough resources. Sometimes one desire is not enough.
I agree that the role of manual curators is very important. We need more manual curators that are driven not only by the Steemit team, but also by the community.
However, changing the reward calculation algorithm would not be superfluous. Perhaps such a variant would be interesting:
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a practical way to get that information to the blockchain at payout time.
Views and reading time are counted at the front-end, so the blockchain doesn't know about them... and in fact, you'd have to combine data from a potentially large number of front-ends.
I suppose something might be possible through the use of "oracles", but that's beyond my knowledge.
If I were the decision-maker, I'd commission a study and use a development environment to try to optimize the algorithm. Probably by testing 3-5 candidates (including trying to 'cheat' them).