Possibly the most popular part of the Hardfork proposal is being rethought. Despite the positive response to the proposal there are many who see potential issues. With every dramatic change there are always people (including me) who constructively criticise the potential impacts of the changes. Personally I see this as one of the greatest ways to encourage user engagement. There is a huge demographic of social media users currently getting "left out". Many people do not consider themselves writers yet they write valuable critique and feedback and are the consumers content creators need to make their creations worthwhile.

Here are some of the arguments currently driving the debate:

Voting bandwidth

One of the questions brought forward was would each separate reward pool also have a separate voting bandwidth.

Curators are very conscious of their voting power when they vote and this is the main reason comments are neglected by voters. There is an opportunity cost since the chances of more votes being placed after your own is much less likely.

How much for comments

There was also some rejection of the seemingly high proposal of 38% of the post reward pool to go to comments. Initially I also saw this as a drastically high number, but when I considered just how many valuable comments there are in comparison to posts - at a time when engagement through comments is actually quite low - to me this number seemed fair. However, I do think the developers have a habit of diving into the deep end without considering their friends who are just learning to swim.

Not to sound too critical of them, but this approach was also taken when proposing to lower the voting bandwidth. A jump from 40 to 5 terrified everyone. If it were possible to take a smaller step first, to ease people in and let them test the waters first, then from there we can choose to move forward or backward or settle on the sweet spot if we've found it.

In saying that, during a Steemit Community Discussion last week hosted by @krnel I did learn something which could be the reason for taking large steps instead of small. What we discussed were the risks involved when hard forking a blockchain. The more hard forks required to achieve something, the greater the risk of error along the way. An error could lead to something like a break in the community, such as what we see with ether and ether classic.

Auto Voting for Curation Rewards

Another argument that was made against the separate reward pool was that this would only create a new window for auto curators to vote without judging the quality of the comments. However, this argument is assuming that comments will continue to give curation rewards, which I am not sure is the intention.

If comments did not give a curation reward to the voters then this would simplify the system. There would be no need for voters to think about what time they should vote at. Voting would be much more natural and authentic, since the vote shows greater appreciation since it is at a cost to the curator. Note: this is not a cost to minnows who do not have enough SP to gain curation rewards anyway.

There is another cost to this proposal that many may have not considered. This comment was made by @pfunk on the github thread.

There does need to be more incentives to stay Powered up. In my opinion, curation isn't enough. Even non-monetary incentives would do wonders. One way that games keeps gamers addicted is the feeling people get from a level up. Each time you level up and receive something meaningful (like a gimmicky new weapon or even digital clothing) this makes the gamer want to continue to the next level. Curation is good, but the target SP level for making meaningful curation rewards is too high. I'm not arguing that it should be lower, but the addition of lower targets would encourage our competitive nature.

Click here for some examples and feel free to add your own ideas here in the comments.

Conclusion

I'm interested in any thoughts on the above but here I would like to draft my own conclusions.

In my opinion there is no need to incentivise curators to vote for comments. The new pool for commenters (if curation rewards were disabled) would encourage more constructive comments. There is already an opportunity cost to voting for comments and yet people do. Therefore I think that opportunity cost should remain, since the reward pool for those who do receive votes would still be more than they get now.

I would also add that since this opportunity cost is much more to those with more SP (the whales) you could speculate that if the whales chose not to vote for comments, then those votes of those with lower SP would have a greater impact on distributing the comment reward pool. I think people underestimate the joy a low SP curator feels in seeing their vote give somebody $0.01 with their vote.

For this reason I would even increase the opportunity cost by removing curation rewards for comments. That way when a large SP holder does vote for a comment, it is because they appreciate the comment enough to take the opportunity cost. The minnows and dolphins who do vote on comments would feel more powerful thus keeping them more engaged.

Where do you think we might find a soft spot for comment rewards? Perhaps 20% would be a fair compromise.

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