My thoughts on the ideas behind the 50/50 split and a suggestion.

Source

Hi
I think most of you know we are changing to a 50/50 split on post rewards between authors and curators. I understand the purpose is to provide a financial incentive to change people’s behavior away from making lots of posts, of possibly low quality and self upvoting them to a different behavior; that of reading or consuming other people’s content and upvoting that content to earn rewards.

I am always a fan of positive incentives versus negative ones.

I think I also understand the “math thinking” here, which is paradoxical. The change reduces author rewards and increase curation rewards, to increase the number of upvotes to authors, thus ultimately increase the total author rewards through increase upvotes.

It’s a sound business strategy to increase profits by decreasing price and increasing the number of units sold. Whether this simple concept will work in our economy with other variables has been debated and the decision has been made, so let’s all hope and/or pray for the success of the change.

Now for my suggestion.

One of the changes also being proposed is adding voting power to each user to use exclusively for downvotes. I think the motivation is to downvote low quality content without the negative incentive of using your voting power on actions that don’t generate money. So the new downvote pool allows you to downvote what you feel is low quality content for free.

What I wish to suggest today, is that instead of creating the 20% voting pool for downvoting posts, we should use that pool as a reward pool for manual curators.

I suggest that the downvote pool could be changed from a negative incentive pool to a positive incentive pool by using it to reward manual creation by platform users by writing into the software code the ability to distinguish between Bots and people by name or other clear characteristics. This would give people a small increase in curation for being people and also encourage engagement.

I think this suggestion to provide a small additional reward pool to reward manual curation is more consistent with the theme and overall objectives of the 50/50 change, which is positive incentives. I think this would stimulate manual curation, stimulate engagement and it’s a relative small investment to potentially help offset the loss of author rewards to smaller account holders in the short term.

I also think it’s better then a change, whose theme or purpose is negative incentives. Negative incentives tend to have negative outcomes, despite their positive intentions.

I am reminded of 18th century England, where the crime of pickpocketing became such a prevalent crime that the government made the penalty for pickpocketing public hanging. Paradoxically pickpocketing increased as the criminals came to the large crowds at the hangings to do more pickpocketing.

I fear that this downvote pool will incentivize flag wars or other complex schemes to create alliances to pool downvotes for financial gain, sort of a real Drug Wars game scenario.

Let’s keep it positive here because positive incentives are the best way to change behavior in my opinion. I think that if we make the behavior and choices we want to see the most profitable choices, we will see more of it.

Let’s start a discussion.

Thoughts?
@shortsegments