You know what's bothering me about Steem more than all this other stuff going on lately. It's been on my mind for a long time, and I've made some comments on it here and there, but not many people seem to be talking about it. Most people are focused on what's happening short term, but this issue may require a much longer view.

Before I really get into this topic, I should also put that the Steem Blockchain is awesome. There is nothing out there like it and it has changed my life already more than I could even describe - and I’m not even that involved in it that much. That being said, take my opinions here with a grain of salt. I’m just sort of laying out some problems I see and some possible solutions. Do I think any of this will change? Probably not but I wish it would.

The 7-day payout drives me nuts.

Maybe I'm missing something big. Maybe there is a very valid reason why posts become worthless after only 1 week. But, it doesn’t make sense and, in my opinion, brings the quality of everyone's posts down. It limits any post to reach it’s true value whether that be to lose money over time or gain it. Either way, 7 days is certainly not long enough to find valuable content and promote it to the top.

I've been here for a while now. Since July 2016, so I'm getting close to 3 years. I'm not the most active person on the blockchain, but I've stuck around through all the major changes over the last few years and it's interesting to think back about some of the changes that took place that newer steemians wouldn't even be aware of.

One of those changes was the payout time. There used to be two payouts; one at 24 hours and the other at 30 days. I believe the idea behind this was because most of the votes usually come within the first 24 hours, which is true in this current setup, and the 30-day payout was there for good content to be curated and pushed to the top of the trending page over the month, gaining extra rewards. I'm not sure this was better, but the people making posts back then seemed to be more focused on producing a better quality post for the long haul of 30 days. People were constantly reminding others about spell checking, grammar, graphics use, and many other things that would help make a post that much better over 30 days, regardless of the content itself. The content still needed to be good, but the better the quality of the content the better the chance it would continue to earn over 30 days.

Now, with the 7-day payout, this importance seems to have gone away a little bit. I'm sure there are still people out there offering tips for new members to make better posts, but people don't seem to be as into ensuring their posts have minimal errors, and I don't blame them - I'm guilty of it too. Hell, I don’t even bother posting some of my content because it isn’t worth it right now to waste good content when I can make the same rewards with lower quality posts or just live streaming while I play a video game.

The thing with a time limit on posts is it drops the requirement to focus on quality and instead focus on quantity. This only makes sense with the current system and I don't think it would be the case if there was no limit on payout time. Why spend a week writing and editing a really good post when you could write 7 half-assed posts in the same amount of time and potentially earn 7x more because quality doesn't matter in the current system? This idea isn’t really referring to regular blog posts, but more to the content like video, art, and writing.

What If There Was No Time Limit On Payouts?

So we have the rewards pool filled with Steem. Everyday people vote on posts drawing steem from the pool one cup at a time and distributing it to members for their posts and comments. The amount distributed depends on the price of steem (the water quality), the supply (the size of the pool), the voters SP (the size of the cup), and a slew of other things I won't bother getting into. That's basically how it is now, right?

So let's say a steemian finds a post from 2 months ago they really like. The old post brought value to that new reader, but there is no way for the author to be rewarded in the same way as if the post was less than 7 days old. Did this old post become worthless after 7 days? I don't think so. So why couldn't the new reader be able to draw from the reward pool today and give some Steem to that older post?

Now I realize to change this there would have to be some major changes involved with the math and rules of the blockchain. I'm not any sort of programmer and I wouldn't even know where to start with this, but I really think this is one of the biggest problems with the steem blockchain right now. Figuring out a way to continuously monetize our content may be the key element here for success. The other problems people are talking about such as SMT’s and communities are also important, but nobody seems to be talking about the way steem is paid out at all.

This might also cause a whole slew of other problems. It would probably cause such a major change that there would be no telling what would really happen. I would never be able to think of all the things that could happen and probably a whole team of people couldn’t think of everything either. I think the idea of still being in beta, though, is that everyone should be open to trying different things while honing in on something that will make this blockchain superior.

Some Ideas On How This Could Work.

I don't know exactly how it would go as I’ve never run this by anybody, but right away I see some issues that would need to be addressed to implement this. How would flagging work? How would payouts work? Those are two big ones right off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty of others you could add to the comments section.

Payout

What if Steem Power could stay on your post until you wanted to cash it out? Not only would your wallet size dictate your steem power, but your actual content could be staked as your SP too. One issue I see with this is that the post value would probably have to be calculated in Steem and not USD. I’d rather have that right now anyway.

Let's say a writer writes a short story and it does really well for months and months on this new system. Every day the post seems to be making a few Steem. So what if the value of the post was counted as your SP until you wanted to cash it out to the Liquid Steem Wallet? The SP wallet would be a tally of the value of all the posts you haven't cashed out + the SP you may have powered up from buying on exchanges or for posts you've cashed out in the past.

Now let's say after about 6 months this original post has made about 2000 SP, but the votes have slowed down. This could be closer to the true value of a well thought out, well executed short story over a 6 month time.

The author feels that they could use that Steem for something, so they press a button on their post to cash out the rewards to Steem - much like we press a button to collect our Steem from posts that have already paid out except for each individual post. This could either be done instantly or start some sort of power down on the post. Maybe use a power down of 10 equal payments over 10 days or something. The exact details aren't important at this point.

The curation rewards could be calculated and distributed at that time as well. Again, I don't know the math or programming required behind this, but it doesn't seem like it would be impossible considering we have similar features already implemented here; specifically, the claim rewards button and the ability to change the payout time.

Now I'm not sure what would be better, or more practical. The original post could either be "refreshed" with a new rewards value to allow it to continue to earn (with a second number showing its total value), or it could be finished just like our posts are now, rendering it unavailable to earn any more rewards. The latter would just require the original short story to be posted again on a new post and a link added to the old post showing new readers where to find the latest version to give rewards. I like the first option better, but again, I'm not sure how the math would work for that. I'd bet it's possible though. There are a number of different ways this could work, but to explain them all in detail would take quite a few posts - so let's move on.

Flagging

I think in order to allow flags, there would have to be a minimum time before a post could be cashed out. That could still be 7 days, or move it back to 30 days to really allow the abusive posts to get taken care of before they can see any rewards. The key would be a minimum time and not a maximum time as we have now. Other than that, I think it would greatly improve the way flagging works around here. If someone decides to flag someone out of anger or because of some flag war, the community would have a much longer time to identify if the flag wasn’t justified and reverse the flag over a much longer time. And if the flag was justified, the post would receive more flags over the long-term and the author of the post would never see any rewards they didn’t deserve - especially if the minimum time was 30 days.

Short Term Posts

I still feel there is value in short term posting, such as posts made by Actifit, daily stats, current news, cryptocurrency prices, etc. These types of posts don't really offer value over the long-term but would serve as a great alternative income of Steem and they are still valuable shortly after they are posted. There could also be an option when authoring a post to automatically pay out at the minimum time and “archive” the post because the author knows it's a short term post. News about the price of Bitcoin isn't quite as valuable over a long period as a short story or a detailed painting that could provide value for decades. There could also be an option to collect all rewards under or over a certain amount so there wouldn’t be a requirement to claim the rewards from each post all the time.

It's Always The Same

What I've noticed over the last few years is that people get the same rewards for all of their posts. These rewards seem to fluctuate over a longer monthly period, but the general rewards seem to be the same for each user's current posts. And of course, there are always exceptions. I'm not naming names, but I see steemians here that earn $20 (as an example) on each and every one of their posts, no matter what they post. It could be a very detailed post about Steem and provide some excellent insight well worth $20 or more, or it could be a picture of what they are having for supper. With the current system, the quality of the post and the real value of the content doesn't seem to matter and it just matters who your followers are. The same happens for just about everybody I see that has some followers and has been here long enough to reach some people. Some steemians earn $1-3 for every post, every time. Some earn $0.50 on every post. Take a scroll through your own feed and see if you can see a pattern. It does seem to go up and down as the price of steem changes and the rules change over a long term, but I bet you'll see that all your posts within a month (with some exceptions of course) earn about the same thing every time. To me, this shows the current blockchain design has no interest in quality or real value for that content. It’s only about who your followers are and how big their wallets are.

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It’s also not that I really care how much I make, either. I don’t need Steem for anything until I can start to pay my rent with it outright and I’m quite content to HODL everything I’ve got, whether steem succeeds or not. I’ve seen it at $0.06 and hopefully, I'll be able to see it pass $60 before too long. But, when I make $1 for an Actifit post that didn’t take me any time or work to make (aside from moving), and then I make $1 for a drawing that took me hours to finish, something just doesn’t add up with that. I see this happening on nearly everybody's blog, not just my own.

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With an unlimited payout time, the above example would work itself out over the long term. The valuable post about Steem would continue to earn more rewards than $20 while the post with a picture of some food would probably stop earning after the initial $20 of votes from regular followers and may even get some flags to better align it with its true value which might be around $5 instead.

Long term valuable posts like short stories, novels, art, music, video, etc, would continue to provide value and continue to earn as long as people liked what they are reading. News about an incoming storm would earn some money short term but would not really get that much attention long term after the storm has passed.

Would It Take Care of Bid Bots?

I don't have any problem with bid bots. The creators of the bots saw an opportunity and they are profiting from it as anyone else should do in a free market situation. Does it wreck the trending page? Oh yeah. Does it really do anything else besides earning its delegators, bot owners, vote sellers, and vote buyers profits? I don't believe so. It really just capitalizes on the fact that posts earn after 7 days. Eliminate that fact and there isn’t much need for bid bots.

Who would pay a bid bot to promote a shitty post when it has the potential to be flagged over the long term? It would be much more practical to just make a good post and let it earn naturally. I’m sure bid bots would still be around, but they would likely change into something else to adapt to the different situation. There's no telling what anyone else will really come up with for profits.

Curation teams would still be a thing and they could really expand their search to really find the best of the best. No more need to find posts quickly to give them their reward when it can be curated for quality at any time.

Writing groups would probably become stronger as well and would cause more people to join them looking for advice and help to make their posts stand out over time, not just 7 days.

Advertising

With bid bots eliminated or reduced, there would still be a need for advertising as that seems to be their main argument for existence. I’m sure there are a number of ways this could be accomplished but here’s an idea I have about how this could work:

Let’s say the same person that wrote the short story in my example above realizes after their post starts getting some attention that people like it and it could use some advertising to help spread it around Steemit.com for even more views. Since there is no time limit on the payout, this isn’t something that has to be done right away but could be done later. Instead of Steemit inc advertising with Google for a revenue stream as they are starting to do now, why not allow steemians to pay for advertising spots on others posts instead? The author of this short story could pay for some advertising through Steemit.com. Steemit would put their advertised post at the bottom of other relevant posts or even through people’s feeds much like Facebook does now. If someone clicks on the advertisement at the bottom of the post, a percentage of the advertising fee could be shared with the author of the post who had the advertisement on their page.

This would benefit everyone involved. It would help the original author promote their post gaining more votes if the content is good, it would help Steemit Inc with their current financial troubles much more than allowing Google to make the real profits from advertising, it would help the person who had the ad posted on their own post giving them some extra income, and it would help other content consumers find similar content they might be interested in. It would keep the whole thing in-house and spread the Steem around accordingly while also getting away from the consumerist mindset of advertising products no one needs.

Now, this wouldn’t just help a single site like Steemit.com. This could be implemented on each unique condenser site like Partiko, Busy.org, SteemPeak, eSteem, DLike, DTube, and whoever else I missed or who starts their own site in the future. Each site could have their own advertising and tweak it to fit the goals of each. The author wanting to advertise could either focus on one location or spread out their advertising budget to cover multiple sites. A percentage of the income generated from advertising on Steemit.com could be put towards advertising on Busy.org and so on and so on.

Facebook, as shitty as it is, has already got a good model for advertising, they just don’t share any of the profits and they got too greedy. They’ll pay for that mistake before too long, but the model of how their advertising works is still pretty solid and isn’t much different than what I just described. It cost something like $3 a day to advertise a Facebook page to 4000 relevant people a day. Steem doesn’t have the same number of users (yet) but I’m sure a couple of hundred relevant users a day could easily cover the advertising cost while allowing the author to make a profit from it. With the Steem blockchain, the data mining to sell to advertisers wouldn’t be as big of an issue because once that is found out to have occurred in secret, people will just move to the next condenser with more ethical values so it could help to keep the sites honest.

What problems would this cause.

I’m not sure what issues would arise from such a major change like expanding the payout indefinitely. I could still go on and on about this issue, but the post is getting a bit long already. I think, if you made it to the end, that you get my point and hopefully you’d agree that the short term payout really helps no one in the long run. I remember hearing Ned talk about other sites implementing their own payout system when (if) SMT’s get rolled out, but if it all revolves around Steem, why not fix Steem first; especially because SMT’s aren't even a real thing yet.

Maybe you can tell me what you think. Would unlimited payout time be better or worse - and why?