RE: An Illustrated Guide to Curation - from the simple to the complex - with real examples from past posts - Part 1
This is an absolutely awesome post! I've been recently wondering how exactly curation rewards are calculated and could not find anything remotely this detailed with a good bit of Googling.
Not only does it provide all of the detailed information but it explains it in a super easy to understand way. Thanks to the graphics I was able to understand the concept almost instantly without having to get into the actual math.
This should win some kind of award. Seriously.
Now that I'm done heaping praise on this great post - I'm thinking about the value of the curation rewards system overall. I understand the point of it of course, but I think it makes things worse as far as distributing rewards and actually surfacing good content.
In practice it encourages people to vote on posts by popular authors that are likely to get a lot of rewards (regardless of the quality of the post, and often without even reading the post) and disincentivizes people to vote for unknown authors who post really good content since those posts are likely to get very little payout.
I wonder how things would be if there were no curation rewards. I suspect the popular authors would get fewer votes since there is no financial incentive to vote for them, and that would really help spread the rewards around more.
It would be great if there could be some curation system that rewards voting for good content from unknown authors. I am going to think about how that could work. When SMTs come out it will be interesting to see how some of them work out with different curation parameters.
Anyway, again great post. Please keep it up!
Thanks @yabapmatt! Both for the praise and for this great comment! I'm certainly planning to add more parts to this guide. I'll have to find a contest to enter it into!
I'm not sure on your conclusion that it makes the distribution of rewards worse though. I'll be looking at this more in part 2 or 3 but my thoughts so far are:
I need to do more research and map out a few individual posts to see the best point / type of post to upvote. I'm sure it will differ by author not just by size. And my guess is that unknown authors who produce single pieces of great content will rank above the whales for curation rewards. We'll see!
Really enjoying this back and forth in the comments - something I'd love to see more of here.
I would love to see some data on the curation returns from voting on an "unknown" post vs a popular author. I just kind of assumed that the return would be better voting for someone popular because their posts will earn more but now that you've shed some light on how it works perhaps i'm wrong.
But even if the math works out in favor of unknown authors for curation rewards, I suspect people just assume like me that if they want more curation rewards they need to vote on posts by popular authors at around the 30 minute mark.
When I say it makes the distribution of rewards worse, I mean that because I suspect that people just upvote popular authors to get the curation rewards and don't upvote unknown authors because they don't feel there is much in it for them. If this is the case (and I only have anecdotal evidence) then I definitely think it would help to concentrate rewards with popular authors.
But like I said - can't wait to see any real data you can dig up, and also once SMTs come out we can start to see the effects of other curation strategies.
I should have some data in the next couple of days. I think the results will vary between different authors so I may have to categorise into a few typical patterns even within the whales section.
The SMTs is a great point. I'm just hoping it's not too expensive to set up. I'd like to be able to distribute my own tokens and set my own reward rules!
Reading back old posts can be really good and fun. In this case I even decided to react, although it's a very old post and you probably don't remember precisely where it's all about...
This post was from 6 months ago. Back then you, and probably many others, were already hoping to see some good things from SMT'S. But one again it seems that things go very slowly, perhaps to slowly?
Then I came up with an idea that might help minnows. Why don't we have a system where higher upvotes provides a lower percentage pay out?
I don't know how to call it precisely, so let me show it with an example.
A post with 1 upvotes gets a post out of $1.00.
A post with 2 upvotes gets a pay out of $1.95
A post with 3 upvotes gets a pay out of $2.85.
So the additional $ will decrease per extra upvote. And where I refer to upvotes I actually mean SP/VP.
What do you think?
I also love this back and forth. I think with the rise of human whale curators, the whole system has returned to incentivizing the finding of good content first. Which is still hard because there's just SO MUCH. But if you can find a post that WILL get a curie first, you're the most likely to get a good curation reward. Alternatively, you can figure out the voting patterns of some trails and get in early on those. But that way lies a race to 0%
I am so thankful for this post! Curation always seemed like this thing that nobody was even bothering to explain.
My vote is only worth about .11 now above 90% power where I keep it. I almost never vote on the "popular" posts as you think of them. My best reward comes from a post that pays out between $10 and $60 maybe. When I get on a huge post early, I can do ok, but it's much easier for me to find the littler guys to jump on. I make good rewards if I vote at 50 cents and the post goes to $2 even. It's a curation fallacy to think you have to only get on $100 posts - that's actually worse rewards unless you are one of those top 100 big guys. You get "stomped down" by their big votes.
Thanks for the response @fitinfun...my guess is that most people don't know what you do (I didn't until this post!) So if most people believe the fallacy then it is still a big problem - if not with the algorithm then with messaging.
Maybe it's as simple as showing in the UI how much of a curation reward you've earned for your vote so far on a post. Right now I think it's like you said - people just see big numbers on popular authors' posts and want to get in on it.
I think there are some programs that do that function. But I just like to see myself in the top 20 - better to be top 10 :)