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RE: Good Curators vs Bad Curators
I agree with a lot of this and I think the problem stems fro the fact that HF 19 made it more profitable to sell votes than to vote for other people. Personally I would like to see the platform shift post reward payouts to favor curation over author rewards and make it more profitable to vote for others, but it would probably be abused and turned into auto posting bots and self votes for that too. Greedy people are going to be greedy and it's a slow fight breaking that scarcity mindset in others. It's one of the reasons I try to promote other users so much. Hopefully things get better with more awareness.
A lot of people are suggesting increased curation rewards and I think they're forgetting why that was changed in the first place. Content is king so I don't believe it would solve anything. I believe it would further discourage good content creators.
I get that and my logic is probably a bit optimistic that quality content would be the only content that could really survive if we did like a 35% or 40% author reward, but the current situation we are in from a business standpoint is that it's simply more profitable to sell and rent voting power than it is to use it to help others. While I have a very giving mindset and want to help and empower others, not everyone is like that and I have to respect that some people simply look at this as an investment and want to maximize their holdings. So the only way I can really see that we do that is to make curation more profitable than selling votes/renting SP. Letting this situation get so out of control has basically created a situation where we have to compete with our own greed now. Because you are clearly aware of the numbers too, there's a lot of people that feel it's a good way to get ahead paying for upvotes. I've been saying they were bad for a long time, but people don't care, they just want to see big numbers on their post payouts. If quality content is what's going to save the platform and make us grow I'm willing to risk it at 35% author rewards and hope that those whales that are selling their votes then find it more profitable to promote quality content, but that's still just optimistic thinking and I accept I could be wrong that they'll ever give a fuck about that.
I think people do care. I'm talking to people all the time who say they don't feel the incentive to post when they have to compete with so much advertising. It is the people who weren't getting rewarded at all before these bots that don't care because they either their content wasn't good and content creation appears to be the only way to make money or because there just aren't enough curators manually voting to find them.
I think both scenarios (auto votes and increased curation rewards) would just discourage the better content creators in favour of worse. I think we could go very quickly from a bear market to a bull market if there was another way for people to make money here. Imagine for example being able to apply for delegation to become an employed curator of the steem blockchain. Fair enough that whale won't increase their stake that way, but their stake will be so much more valuable. And I believe it is sustainable too, as before delegation gets removed so that the delegator can power down, curators would have collected a certain amount of SP to continue curating with.
I agree that steemit inc (basically @ned for this discussion's sake) or some of the larger whales could use their funds to empower curators to use them to promote quality content and grow the platform. Even with like 80,000 SP or more behind @minnowsupport it's not like we can give out massive upvotes. I'm thinking putting 10,000 SP on 100 accounts would be a much better idea than putting a million SP delegation on 2 people and thinking they are going to be able to curate enough different people to matter. I will say that I think SurpassingGoogle has done a hell of a job using the delegation that Ned sent his way and worked his ass off to utilize it to better the platform, but it's one person. I'm just not sure the decisions from steemit Inc are the right ones in the long term. We'll have to see what happens, but discussing it and considering the different options is always good and I'm glad when I see posts like this that acknowledge there actually is a problem.
Exactly. I would much prefer more people with small amounts than a few people with large amounts. However there are 2 things to consider, firstly a delegator should (imo) only delegate to as many people as they can keep an eye on. The 2 main perks of delegating to people instead of curating yourself or using bots is being able to spend less time on the platform while you can trust that the curation is being used in an engaging way that brings value back to their investment. That's what bots do not do because of the amount of abuse they are prone to. But the delegator will still need to be able to check up on the people they've trusted in case they are doing anything that does not bring value. Secondly, since these people would be gaining SP from their curation rewards, it would be best to try to select the best curators. Out of the 5 curators @ned originally selected, there was only 1 @surpassinggoogle. But I agree with you, more would be better, I think it's about finding that magic number.
Glad to see we're on the same page. Hopefully things get fixed one way or the other, because it's clear as hell to me that we aren't ready to leave beta.
Agreed. I fear SMT's are taking way too much priority right now when we haven't yet established a sustainable network. Just had a eureka moment about how to encourage delegation, but since it would require a hard-fork I have my doubts that it would be validated. Will post about it soon nonetheless.