RE: Designing a Curation Guild System for Steemit
While this is mitigated somewhat by the 3 month power down, curation guilds have daily operational expenses. Thus, the rewards must be paid out 50% liquid / 50% SP - the same as author rewards.
I disagree with the idea of curation guild being like an organization that profit from curation. As you mentionned voting donors will enter a guild through a smart contract, why the need for a middleman? How can people be guaranteed that they will be paid for curation? This sound terribly wrong to me.
For me, curation is the one universal selling point of Steem/it. Sure, authors get paid, but there's ample incentive for authors on other social networks. They may not be rewarded by money, but they are with attention, audience and engagement - which may be more valuable than money for content creators. But no major social network rewards curators.
I totally agree with this. There is a saying that goes like " 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk "
This means that curation rewards will be the main way for 99% of the users to earn something. In the future I predict we will have to adjust % ratio between author reward/curation reward. I expect curation rewards will be a lot higher than author rewards.
In my opinion curation guilds should be trustless and not controlled by anyone and should be integrated within the interface so that anyone can enter with a mouse click and no specific knowledge. Also it is very important to rewards curators individually for their curation talents than rewarding everyone in the pool equally, if you rewards people based on the guilds performance you lose incentive for people to do good curation.
Perhaps you misunderstand - curators will be paid directly from the guild's revenues, and it will all be done automatically by the CGS (see the bit right above your quote).
Also, if a guild decides to be a for-profit organization, that is totally within their right. There may also have other expenses to cover.
If you don't like a guild that is for-profit, simply don't join it. Join one that distributes 100% of its revenues to curators. (Said revenue being curation rewards earned via the voting power donors)
It's not the for profit that bothers me it's the fact that curation payments are at the mercy of those who control the guilds. The whole point of the blockchain is that we can automate these rewards in a trustless way without a middleman taking a cut.
And it is automated. See above. No one's payments are ever at the mercy of anyone. I think I was pretty clear about that!
Ok so every rules of the guild is written in a smart contract and run by code?
Precisely. Everything is automated. Once the rules are set for a guild, all rewards are distributed automatically.
Well, not everything - some things like co-ordinating and negotiating with voting power donors, recruiting and managing curators, schedules and budgets of course require human effort.
Answering to the last message here.
Can you explain how exactly these guilds work.
From my understanding voting donors give their posting key to a few individuals who then vote for the post they like. I fail to see how the current guilds allow everyone to participate/curate and benefit from donors' voting power.
Do these guilds give out the posting key of donors to every curators? Even this wouldn't make sense actually as there is no way to allocate same amount of power to every curators by doing so...
See the section "Today's curation guilds". Some donors give their posting key, which we then set up bots for. While others prefer to manage their own bots. Votes are made by proxy accounts, which then trigger the whale votes indirectly. Each proxy account has a different combination of donor accounts (which is in flux) to maximize available voting power.
To me the idea of curation guild was basically users entering a pool, the total voting power of this pool is then split equally between all the users of that pool, this means that users with low voting power can earn more curation rewards and inactive whales can still earn rewards from curation . However I am not sure how you make this happen without a code specifically design to do that? When the founders spoke about curation guilds my understanding was that they would build this piece of code and that it would be trustless.
Sure, you can create an open, free-for-all curation guild under this system, but I can bet not a single whale will donate their voting power willy nilly. They'd only delegate it to a trusted curation guild. You don't have a trusted curation guild if it's free for all, everyone voting how and as they please. So there will need to be people managing the guild, who decide whether a curator is given the permission to vote on their behalf.
Everything written in this post is a specification proposal for a system. Of course, this would need to be coded.
Are proxy accounts manual curators' account or bots? If the latter I don't see how normal users can benefit from such guild.
If I want to curate for a guild what is the process to enter and how do I earn more curation rewards than I would with my current voting power?
That's up to the guild. For example, with Curie, all votes are manual, and vouched by two people. But there could be an automated curation guild just as well, in which case curators will be bot developers. Basically, the system should allow for all kinds of guilds.
If you want to curate for a guild, it can either be a free-for-all guild where you can just register and start voting, or a moderated/managed guild. For the latter, you'd have to negotiate/convince with the managers of your curation skills.
Currently, Curie has a public submission channel #curie at Steemit.chat. Curators are paid 8 Steem per post. I haven't written about how the CGS can handle public submissions which are then approved by curators/voters, but that could be worked into it as well.
How many curators does curie have roughly and do these curators vote with their own account which then triggers the whales account?
What do you mean vouched by 2 people?
8 steem per curated post? this number seems a bit off no? 8 steem per post is basically the average curation reward of a whale, so if this is divided among many curators it would be a lot less unless there are very few curators.