Some of the more vocal users of the platform have been expressing their disapproval of the implementation of a separate reward pool for comments on the basis that it isn't necessary and the comments do fine as they are. My theory (based on my experience of speaking with users off the blockchain) is that the many users who would benefit from this feature aren't being heard because they simply aren't the blogging type which makes them less vocal.

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Comments have a very different level of visibility and therefore get considerably fewer votes. In the past month only 1% of rewards were paid to commenters. Due to the nature of the N^2 reward curve it means comments are not competing against other comments, but against the top bloggers.

This is an excerpt from the post on the pending Hardfork 17 which proposed an Independent Comment Reward Pool. As said at the time of the post, only 1% of the total post reward pool was going to comments.

The majority of these comment rewards come from commenting on posts of significant importance to a handful of large stakeholders. Therefore, commenters are incentivised to comment mainly on posts where they can catch a whales vote which is only a tiny portion of posts, usually by the same authors.

We feel that engaging more people in discussion and encouraging higher quality comments will make the platform more desirable. While relatively few people want to blog, many more are interested in commenting.

There are only so many people in the world who'd call themselves a "blogger" and despite my participation on steemit I wouldn't be one of them. Despite my efforts, and the efforts of many people I've come to know on steemit I haven't recruited anybody to post as regularly as I do. This is despite a lot of interest by my friends and family members, and of those people who joined but never posted, they just don't know what to write about.

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There is a huge demographic of potential STEEM users who are left out of the hype of steemit because of the lack of incentive for curators to vote on comments. There is an opportunity cost to using your (soft) limited voting power for comments instead of posts.

If all comments only have to compete against other comments, then more users can participate and comments can collectively garner a larger percentage of the reward pool.

This opportunity cost would still exist given the above scenario, but it wouldn't matter since there would be a set amount of rewards allocated to comments. This would certainly encourage more comments as well as more valuable comments. In order for people to add more valuable comments they will need to efficiently read and understand the original post, which will drive engagement on the site.

We are proposing that comments be allocated 38% (golden ratio) of the current reward pool and that comments be rewarded on a N log (N) curve with some to-be-determined modifications. This should work to allocate more rewards to those who contribute to discussions and drive community engagement.

Removing curation rewards

The main argument against the above proposal is that without curation rewards for comments, curators will be taking a 38% cut. I can understand the fear behind this argument, with there being only so many reasons to hold Steem Power, and curations rewards being the main incentive.

Personally I see curation rewards as somewhat flawed. Don't get me wrong, I see more reason to keep them than remove them completely, but when I think of curating I think of the job of a "curator" in a gallery or a museum.

Content curation is the collection and sorting of information.

A curator of a gallery or a museum manages the appearance and experience for the audience (visitors) by organising collections of material by giving certain material more visibility than others and creating a layout that can be easily digested by the audience.

When it comes to posts, there is good reason to organise a collection of posts to grant visibility to the ones that either deserve the visibility or would benefit the majority of people by being more visible. Comments on the other hand are nested as replies to a post and though they can be organised within the post, there is far less curation there especially because only a portion of the audience viewed the post, let alone the comments. Comments just aren's curatable in the same way as blog posts.

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One of the main problems with curation on steemit is the same authors receiving rewards all the time, which makes it easier for curators to predict where they will gain rewards. If comments were to allocate curation rewards, we could continue to see a trend of popular commenters being rewarded more often than new commenters - who may offer more value and constructive commentary. By removing the curation rewards, we maintain the same opportunity cost of voting for comments, but we also remove the incentive to vote for comments only to gain curation rewards. The curation of comments would therefore be a lot more natural, and only those that were worth the opportunity cost of the vote would gain rewards.

Who would vote?

The removal of curation rewards would affect some users much more than others. The larger stakeholders are the ones who benefit from curation rewards, while smaller stakeholders (minnows) don't really gain curation rewards with so little SP to vote with. For this reason, there is less opportunity cost to a dolphin than there is for a whale, and there is practically no opportunity cost to a minnow for voting for comments.

If these comments had a seperate reward pool, and those with higher SP were less incentivised to vote for comments, then the comment reward pool could be distributed by users who vote for them - which would mostly be minnows! Theoretically, minnows could feel like their vote has a lot more power and that could be extremely encouraging for smaller and newer users. I do not think for a second this would create an incentive to stay with low SP because these minnows would still not gain curation rewards. I think instead, as these users learn to appreciate their power to reward content with their vote, many of them would consider powering up in order to have more influence on the platform.

Potential to expand STEEM outside steemit

Here is the most exciting thing about the Comment Reward Pool proposal. I am unsure about how, but I think there is potential for STEEM comments to be implemented onto websites that are NOT on the STEEM blockchain, such as blogs and blogging platforms. I can't remember where that was talked about before so if somebody could provide a link I would be very grateful.

If bloggers off steemit could implement a STEEM comment thread which displayed the monetary rewards on the comments, this could be a great way to drive people to steemit and put steemit in the view of more people online. This gives us a lot of potential to grow! The only issue would be if those rewards were miniscule, which they are with the current system.

Beta mode is for testing

This post was inspired by another @steemitblog post about changing the reward curve and testing it on the newly allocated comment reward pool. I want to remind people here that steemit.com is still in beta and so is the STEEM blockchain. We are still testing out different variables to figure out what works best, and my confidence in STEEM comes from the developers fearlessness in trying different things. It's only natural for people to become attached to a system that we are used to, but there will be many hard forks along the way and we should all be aware that risks are necessary in this early phase of development.

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