We're about to get paid-membership curation guilds
In the past several weeks, there has been quite the furor over several proposed changes to the reward system in Steem. My post today is also about one of the proposed changes, but on a totally new topic, and one that has the potential to make some people angry. It also has the potential to make people some money and promote some good content, so read on.
Harkfork 17 will allow authors to buy votes directly with their author rewards.
I submit to you Issue #773, "Comment Reward Beneficiaries." This new feature will allow a post author to commit a portion of their post's rewards to any other account. My understanding is that it's designed to help organizations like @busy.org earn revenue, because a website like busy.org can require authors who use their platform to pay a "fee" in the form of a 10% commitment of author rewards. They'll say "you want to post with us? If you let us take a bit of your reward, we'll let you post with us!"
What else will this new feature allow? There has been an ongoing discussion lately about "how do you fund curation guilds?" @curie has continually had to deal with waning curation rewards; the bots of Steem discover what content Curie is voting on, and then vote first to take the rewards. Curie then ends up with less and less curation rewards to fund their operations. With the new feature, this discussion could go away. Now you fund them directly with author rewards. Let me walk you through how this will work with a simple example.
How paid-membership curation guilds might work
Once the new feature goes into effect, a new curation guild will be founded, let's call it Burie. Burie will sign up some whales who want to sell their voting power, and then they'll put out a call to new authors: "Commit a 20% portion of your author rewards to the @burie account, and then if we like your article, we'll commit to voting for you with our whale voting power."
This could come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from deeply pathological to richly beneficial. For starters, @curie should probably immediately update their model to take advantage of this feature. They can still enforce all their quality metrics, but now they'll actually make a living doing it and they won't have to anger the steemizens by self-voting to get there. This is where paid voting can be good and beneficial. They'd pitch the commitment of author rewards as a "review fee" or something like that; they wouldn't commit to voting on a post just because they were paid to look at it.
How could this go wrong? Well, the good news is that this probably won't ever be worse than simple self-voting by whales. Right now a bad whale could post a million comments, upvote all of them, and cash out a generous portion of author rewards. The shape of the reward curve disincentivizes this somewhat, but there's still money in it. @transisto recently did this here. If you look down at the comments on that article, he posted many comments and self-voted all of them for around a buck apiece. He didn't do this to be malicious, but the only way to make it go away completely is to get some other whales to flag the bad whale and remove his rewards.
In the context of splitting author rewards, now a bad whale could set up shop with a dumb bot that says "any account that commits at least 20% of author rewards to me will get an upvote." A couple of those upvotes will go to good content, but most will not. Most of the upvotes will be spent on garbage posts that are just looking to get a buck. How bad could this be? Well, not that bad - not worse than if the whale just set up the bot to post-vote himself 40 times per day.
Unintended consequence, perverse incentive, or undocumented feature?
The consequence of this new feature as it relates to voting is clear. Paid voting will certainly be possible, and will likely be a major part of steem in the next few months.
What is less clear is whether or not this will be bad. As I pointed out, this could be used for good by having the paid guild still enforce quality requirements on the votes they sell. It will put quite a bit of money into the pockets of anyone who can convince a whale to lease out some of his voting power. Will it lead to new, unpredictable, perverse consequences? Time alone will tell.
Note: My current voting bot will not have votes for sale. My clients signed up for autovoting, not for paid voting and I will respect that.
(image from pixabay)
Well that's going to be interesting. As far as I've seen, if things can be used for the greed of people, they probably will be used for that purpose. I wonder what reality will show us in the end!
Wow, amazing post.
Whales renting their vests?
Right, that's a possible (and I think inevitable) effect.
Very interesting post sir! Good food for thought I wonder how they will begin to handle these things, only time will tell.
I could be a bit confused but I think this is what the new reward curve is about, minimising the distortion from self-voting. Really though it goes in somewhat a longer circuit but the concerning activity still amounts to self-voting. Whatever improvement the new curve (and the 38% comment partition) causes I think it is hoped that it will diminish this kind of effect.
The thing I think that more visibly and bandied-about thing will be 'charity posts'. I think by itself even if the new curve and partition don't make much difference either way, this is a social good. There could be a security benefit for the paranoid also - to pay all the rewards out to another account that rarely has transactions broadcast from it. @the.masses experiment could have some interesting angles that might see it resurrected if its posts can be funneled to other accounts.
I'm not sure how capable the protocol for this reward sharing is, but it could do some neat things if you could tell it to do the transfers to a user with a specific memo (like to blocktrades) and have that go through tumblers or into a fiat gateway that pays out some minimum amount when it accumulates into a debit card or so.
I'm quite excited to see exactly what people will do with it apart from what has already been thought of.
Yeah, there may be a very interesting set of new possibilities.
Really great post, these implications did not occur to me 😅 Thanks 👍
I think there will be some negative consequences, but what we will hopefully see is people responding to these and using their own power to reject the practice. Let's see how the free market hands it 😜
Haha, I love the name Burie! Someone should register it.
I always thought of this as a feature for co-authoring etc. But you're right, it could just as easily be used as you describe, for vote buying.
It's not relevant to Curie though. Firstly, because the authors we look out for are new to Steemit and probably won't have a clue about this feature or Curie. In the early days, some authors used to donate their rewards to Curie - perhaps this could be used for that instead.
Curie will have to do with whatever curation rewards it earns - that's the only source of revenue. If the rewards aren't enough, curators will move on to other guilds which pay better. There's still a ton of posts bots don't touch, and that may only increase as the site grows.
There may come a point at which the curation community is so active and thriving that Curie won't be feasible anymore. That would be when Curie has achieved it's goal of stimulating a curation community that isn't just bots frontrunning only a dozen or two authors. That seems bizarrely warped given the progress we have made, but that's precisely how it used to be, as you'd remember. So, if that ever happens, Curie's current model would have been utterly successful and will bow out hanging its boots in pride. :)
I can really only see steemit.com becoming more and more of a power hitter in the cryptoblogosphere.
What happened to simplicity! Haha. "Has this whole world gone crazy"!? (Which movie is that from?).