RE: Regulating Curation on SteemIt
SteemIt doesn't post the hit count anywhere, does it?
A long time ago I read a post that said SteemIt had a hit counter, but removed it. Hit counters are easy to manipulate.
Without hit counters, we don't know how many people read an article.
My observation on general sites, BTW, is that general public usually doesn't find an article until after the search engines scour the web. The general public usually finds articles several weeks after the article has been published. SteemIt authors don't get any reward for the general web traffic that they bring to the site.
Anyway, I can only write about the data that is provided to me. All of the data I have seen shows that the amount of curation is driven by the refresh rate of voting power.
That means that changing to the 50/50 structure won't increase curation activity, it will simply drop the author rewards by 30%.
The question of how one can bring in users that buy STEEM POWER and how to keep authors for powering down in a completely different question. I don't see a change to a 50/50 structure bringing in new casual readers.
PPS: There may be some value in creating special reader accounts.
Such readers are better motivated by delegation than by changing the curation reward structure.
They had view counters for a while, but they disappeared without comment. I had assumed that it was because the view numbers were so low. It looked sort-of silly when a post with 5 views was getting $300 in rewards.
By 33% in terms of Steem power, but (hopefully) the increase in audience size and the value of Steem would more than compensate for that drop, and the end result would be an increase in satisfaction and reward value. You're right, we can't know the effect of a change until we try it, but it would be simple enough to reverse the change if it didn't work as hoped. Maybe, before implementation, the community should insist on some metrics and a checkpoint date to see if the change worked as intended and - if not - reverse it.
Also, when you talk about the recharge rate, you're assuming that the number of voters stays the same. I believe that wouldn't happen. A way to look at it is that by adding voters and moving Steem from the exchanges to powered-up wallets, we'd (hopefully) be speeding up the aggregate recharge rate.
When counting readers one has to consider two groups: Readers with STEEM POWER and readers without. Most casual readers will not invest in STEEM POWER. Increasing the curation reward really does nothing for casual readers with little STEEM POWER. Their curation rewards will be at most a few pennies a week.
The audience you are looking at is people who want to invest in STEEM and who like curating, but don't like posting.
A better approach to this audience would be to create a program specifically for them. This could be done with with a SteemConnect app and delegation.
For example one might offer a matching delegation. This type of product would best be done through SteemConnect.
A person who wants to read without writing could say: I want to be a dedicated curator.
They would go to a busy.org clone that counts the articles that they read.
Steemit bloggers could delegate SP to a central account which would then give these dedicated readers a matching delegation. By matching delegation I simply mean that their delegation would increase as their SP increases. It would decrease if they powered down.
Creating a system that directly rewarded people for curating would do a better job rewarding curators than the 50/50 split. I might write this up as a new post.
You're right that the curation split won't (directly) attract readers who don't have Steem Power, but current incentives lean too heavily towards content creation, and not heavily enough towards content discovery. I believe that's part of the reason for the low engagement (unless one writes about Steem ;-). If voters do a better job at content discovery, it should draw uninvested readers as a 2nd-order effect.
Yes, there are a variety of possible third party work-arounds. But if we get the incentive structure right on the blockchain itself, then we shouldn't need third party hacks to make up for the deficiencies.