RE: What is quality content? and how much is it worth?
I'm not even sure if I know where to begin. :)
Maybe here. Perspective does play a role in associating value with anything. In fact, maybe it plays the main role if there's not a clear cut intrinsic value. You can tear apart an iPhone and generally come up with an amount for the sum of the parts that equals roughly half what Apple charges.
At some point during all of those transactions, business to business and then to user, each one determined, like it or not, that each part was worth what they bought it for and the same for each phone. So, yes, value is in the eye of the beholder, just as is what constitutes quality. Very subjective.
All that said, most of us are used to having the worth of something associated with time, because we work in jobs where we get paid by the hour, or we get paid by the contract or the project, where we then try to do things as efficiently and as quickly as possible, thus making our time "more valuable."
In the case of Steemit or the STEEM blockchain where all of the social media apps currently exist, we're not talking about things we can quantify by the hour. It's not even like a business where services or products are generally set and agreed to before the work is done, not after. In the case of Steemit, we're creating whatever it is, and then flinging it out there for others to assign value to, or not. In other words, on a much smaller level, we're repeating what happens to STEEM on the macro level. We're taking what we see from others who fling it and say, this is what this is worth. Only, we don't have the resources to necessarily assign it what we would, and we've got a host of other reasons for rationing and rationalizing how we use our varied control over the reward pool.
The truth is, most people who are active on STEEM at any given time do not see what we post. So, our value is being based on the amount of people who actually upvote it of the group that actually read it of the group that actually saw it. It's increasingly diminishing returns. In most cases, we're talking the collective upvotes between 2-40 users. Which means, with roughly 60,000 active users a day, at best, 0.0667% of daily users are actually upvoting our stuff. I would say that the difference between those who might be reading (or because they can, have us on autovote because they read our posts a few times and thought it was good) and those who upvote is probably small. I'm also going to guess that the numbers that actually see us at any given time is small, too, not reaching anything more than a factor of three to five, which means the total amount of eyeballs on our stuff won't exceed those of 200 people. That may actually be too generous of an estimation.
So, before we can really assign worth, we'd need to know how many people see it versus how many people upvote it.
One problem here on Steemit or any platform trying to reward content, is content won't ever be rewarded fairly. I don't know what would be fair, but this isn't it. For instance, I would like to upvote such a fine comment as yours, but my vote is at the dust level with the price of Steem this low. I went from upvoting every piece of content I found interesting or entertaining during the first few days on here. To rationing out my voting power so I maintained 80%. I thought I was rewarding, but come to find out because of the dust vote limit, I was just wasting my vote. So, now my goal is to get my vote above the dust vote threshold, so I can at least actually reward some of the quality content I run across. I said all that to say, sorry my vote is dust, so there is no need to upvote your quality comment, but I do value your opinion very much.
It's hard to put a value on anything. It's even harder to put a value on content.
I had a t-shirt business for awhile. I could purchase a shirt for about $2 and a heat transfer for $1. At that point those items were worth $3 because that's what I paid for them. But if I successfully transferred the picture or whatever to the shirt, I could sell that for $12.95, or $9.99 on sale. But if I messed up, I was lucky to recoup my $3. What is a shirt and a heat transfer worth? Depending on perspective either $3 or $12.95.
What is a rock worth? I can purchase 1 ton of river rock for about $100 or $0.05/pound.
If someone bags that rock, I will have to pay about $8 for 40 pounds or$0.20/pound .
Is river rock worth a nickel or 20 cents?
Yes!
What is Steemit quality content worth?
Whatever it earns 7 days later.
That's not to say the value of that quality content is equal to what it ends up being worth.
If you happen to write a post about how to change a tire, the value of that content might be $1 million to someone, someday. But I highly doubt you will make anywhere's close to $1M for writing the post.
It is true that you tend to get rewarded for quality content in proportion to the # of eyes that see your content in 6.5 days of you writing it. I've been putting in a lot of overtime, so don't see nearly as much content here as I did just a few weeks ago.
I think once the competition begins for users on the Steem blockchain, it will be a good thing. I think someone, somewhere will come up with a fairer reward system. I think one key will be to have a reward system available past the 6.5 day limit.
And with that, I'm off to work...
Thanks to tossing around ideas with me Glen. I've always enjoyed that!