👀 Why Rate Limiting Curation Rewards is Vitally Important to the Future of Steemit

The fair distribution of content rewards is essential to the long-term success of Steemit.

If users believe that they have a reasonable chance to get paid for good content, they will continue to post and up their game.

If they feel there is little chance of making more than .01-.03 SBD for good posts, they will stop contributing - and probably leave.

Retention is 10 times more important than recruitment. Getting people here is not that hard. Keeping them here for the long-term is.

There is a set amount of content rewards to pay out. If one post is making $15,000 SBD, that is $15,000 SBD that is not being paid out to all the other posts. Maybe the post does deserve that much. Some posts probably do. That is fine, and it will continue to be up to the community to decide that.

Currently though, the reward structure is setup in such a way that the majority of the rewards are being paid to a small set of people, for a small handful of posts - not necessarily because they have the best content. 

Curators are encouraged to vote for popular authors, because they know the posts will be getting a lot of votes. This induces a "pile on" effect.

Lesser known authors (even if their content is better), are less likely to receive upvotes - because curators know they will not likely be making as much by upvoting their post.

Good authors build followers, and they deserve to continue receiving large payouts for their posts (as long as they continue to produce good content). We do not want to discourage people from building followings, and earning more from all the hard work they put in to gain followers.

We do however want to discourage the "pile on" effect, where curators simply vote on a post just because they expect it will become popular.

A good way to do this is to limit the curation rewards on a post, after it starts to reach a certain payout. This will encourage curators to hunt out more good content that is not popular yet, and hasn't been noticed by the curators following the 'popular' crowd.

I am not the first person to bring this up. @liondani recently wrote a similar post "DON'T REMOVE Curation Rewards! Just stop them when the post reach the trending page". @dantheman has also brought it up in several comments. Lots of other people have suggested it as well.

People can still upvote content no matter how high the payout gets. After a certain point though - it will start to be more because they feel it is good content that deserves a higher payout, and less because they expect to gain a large curation reward by following the crowd.

There are lots of ways to implement this. One way would be to slowly taper the rewards as a percentage of the payout - similar to how they are currently increased as the post time goes from 0 to 30 minutes. They could continue to pay out something indefinitely, just less and less as the payout on the post continues to go up.

Another thing to consider, is where to set the threshold. What is considered a high paying post? Should curation rewards start to be throttled once the post reaches $100 SBD? $300? $1,000? Should it change based on the amount of total rewards available to pay out? What is considered a high paying post today, may be different by the time Steemit reaches 1 million users.

I know the dev team is very hard at work adding lots of new features and enhancements to Steemit. They are already doing a tremendous job to make Steemit better! I realize that implementing this correctly will require a lot of work. Getting this right though, at this stage of Steemit's growth - is crucial! 

We are attracting lots of new users. We want them to be encouraged to stay!

Thank you for taking the time to read my post and consider the idea 🌈

[Edit] I have also opened GitHub Issue 158 for this.