You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Why Rewards Have to Change... (Fair warning, this is a long one)
Crux of the problem: voting bots give predictable ROI, curation doesn't (at least the way the voting window algo works right now)!
If I have lots of SP, why would I waste my precious time curating when I can just passively delegate my SP and collect a steady and predictable income.
You can play with the curator/author reward percentages all you want, the outcome will be the same. Full-time curators with large SP will want a steady income for their time spent on this platform, or else they go to the bid-bots or spend their $ on other coins.
What other coins? I'm not aware of any coins that provide for any other mechanism than capital gains for ROI. Were we to end profiteering from Steem rewards, I'm pretty confident that the value of Steem would rise very quickly, and begin to accurately reflect the quality of the blockchain and our use case. Social media has proven to be the most valuable business model in the world today. That's what the FAANGs have proven.
Given our use case, the profiteering has been an incredible deterrence to capital gains. The token Steem is much better currency than BTC, ETH, or almost any other, and is consistently ranked amongst the top ten. There is no better use case. That our market cap has been dropping is a testament to the harmful effects of extracting the value of social media content before it can inure to the investment vehicle.
If you had lots of SP and rewards were capped so that the maximum amount of Steem you could extract from one vote was 1 Steem, would you bother trying? It'd be a complete waste of time better spend on more profitable pursuits. There'd be no point to votebots, either.
Capital gains have successfully repaid investors since before there was money. It encourages investors to increase the value of the investment vehicle, whether oxen, gold, or stock certificates today. It will work great for Steem too. We've proven profiteering will not work in the last three years. I reckon we should make the switch to a functional reward system, not make the profiteering more profitable as EIP will.
I still find it hilarious that people actually pay for votes and tell themselves that they're getting promotion out of it. Aside from the handful of people that bother reading anything here... who are they promoting to? It's most more cost effective and reaches a much wider to audience to just make the same post on Medium and Facebook market it for about $10 bucks. If promotion is what people were really looking for, they wouldn't be using bidbots, but it looks it's going to come to an end one way or another as the price of STEEM gets closer to zero. Time will tell.
It's not just authors though, almost all dApp creators make use of bid-bots to gain visibility for their announcements. The bid-bots essentially created a type of competition for attention on Steemit. From the author's end, bid-bots offer ROI, although it is very unpredictable.
Have you looked at how promotion works on PALnet? This has been a pull request for Steemit for almost 2 years. Actual guaranteed promotion could be had in a way that benefits the platform, but whales that controls the witnesses don't want that, they'd rather sell votes.