RE: Steem Voting from a Different Point of View
Thanks for the feedback.
That is to say, many of these curators getting rewards are people who have walked away from the platform.
True, but at some point if the price goes up and/or the platform gains users, it will be worth their while to come back. They are still stakeholders as long as they don't power down, and by holding steem and providing a weak approximation for their preferences, they're still providing a small service. I look at it like mining bitcoin. In 2009, you could do it with a desktop cpu. If no one tampers with it too much, I expect curation rewards difficulty to follow a similar path.
If you look at where most of the curation rewards are actually going, youll see that they don't do much to combat decentralization.
Well, they sort-of can't do much to combat decentralization with the N2 curve and if they're only getting 12% of the new coins in total. HF17 may help. Of course, the increasing difficulty also favors centralization, so we'll have to see how that plays out.
It won't. they decided to keep the n^2 curve.
Oh, that's a surprise. I'll have to go read the github comments.
Update:
Found it:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/913
So it looks like it's probably still coming, but not in hf17.
Either way, as long as there's a many--to-one relationship between voters and authors on a rewarded post, it seems that curation rewards should be be more effective than author rewards at decentralizing payouts (subject to the constraints imposed by the rewards curve, the pool size, and the reverse auction).