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RE: I want to have my cake and eat it too! (No more powerful whales, and the price of STEEM must go up!)
Good points.
Another thing is there are more content consumers in the world than content creators. If votes had more influence and rewards attached to them, curators would not be necessary and user retention would stay higher. If a new user could be rewarded for upvoting and their upvote rewarded the author too, it would solve a lot of issues Steemit is facing. What are your thoughts on that?
I'm not 100% sure what you are proposing, but technically everybody is a 'curator'. The main thing is that curating is not profitable or influential for a new user because they don't have much SP to back it up. The problem with giving the 'new' users extra voting power and curation rewards is it sets up a scenario where higher SP holders will just create lots of little accounts, because they will get higher curation and influence that way.
Curation guilds are the idea that is being floated around right now that might solve the issue you are referring to though. Nobody knows how they will work exactly, but I think the idea is to be able to delegate the large amounts of voting power that SP holders have to guilds, so that the members can use the SP to add more weight to the curation of the guild. I assume you are familiar with the Curie project. It sounds like the idea is going to be similar to that, except formally built into the blockchain.
I created a discussion post about them here actually. You might want to check it out.
https://steemit.com/curation-guilds/@timcliff/thoughts-for-curation-guilds
I agree. Because curating and upvoting is not profitable for new users, that is one of the main reasons there's a retention problem. As hard as we try to recruit people, most are inactive or bounce. That's because most people are not content creators.
Are you familiar with the 1% rule?
The vast majority of people who join Steemit are just going to consume rather than create content. They will upvote or comment and when they see how little reward they receive for doing so unless they have (buy) SP, they will stop being active as the statistics in steemstats show.
I had not thought of that. Good point.
I know of all the guilds like Curie and have had posts included on most of them. I'm even curating myself for SteemTrail. That's when this idea occurred to me actually.
It's work to curate good content and when new users do it for the first time, it quickly becomes apparent that the real rewards are in creating content. If you're the 99% that only consume content you'll most likely go back to Facebook.
Curation Guilds cost money to operate. Why not redirect those funds to new user rewards to curate good content. If a new user starts earning something besides .0001 steem, they may stick around and start curation teams. But to ask them to switch gears and start creating content to earn steem power when most just will not create content, is turning people away.
We should find a way to reward new users for just sticking around and reading, commenting and upvoting good posts and we should do it early in their introduction to Steemit or the retention and active users are not going to improve significantly.
Placing value on a consumer who interacts with authors of content and the platform and rewarding this behavior in line with the author's rewards, would benefit the new users and the authors without needing to get whales to form curation guilds.
@stellabelle proposed a "Social Energy" algorithm, that would consist of not just upvotes, but comments - user engagement- to determine some of the reward value. Whales creating a lot of little accounts would be less effective that way, because they would also need to do a lot of commenting with those self-created accounts to benefit from them.
It's not right that we need whale votes to earn decent rewards. If I write a piece of content that helps newbies and 300 newbies find it really useful and upvote, plus comment, then why is that worth zilch???
Exactly. And a new user seeing that 300 upvotes, in your example, is not worth zilch is not going to stick around unless they are a content creator, a minority of the internet population.
Stellabelle gets it, and I like this social energy algorithm. I would say that commenting should be counted separately from posting articles. It deserves it's own number. Upvotes on comments would create a score that adds to social capital or energy. If a bot is posting comments, it will lack social capital since nobody will upvote it. IMHO there needs to be a way for a new user to be able to rapidly ascend to a moderate level through a combination of creating content, social interaction, and curation. Someone who does all 3 things religiously should not be a minnow for 5 months, as many are.
I agree with what you are saying about creating vs. consuming content. It is really good info that has me rethinking a couple of my positions on some of the fundamentals of how the system Is running.
Regarding the new users getting more power, I think that is one of the things curation guilds have the potential to solve. Imagine if a new user joined a guild that helped to decide how 50% of @ned's voting power was used. I'm not sure about the implementation details (part of what this post is trying to discuss) but in theory that user could be part of the decision on what posts/comments received the guild's upvote, and potentially share in part of the rewards from the curation.
That's a step in the right direction, but only a step.
Mass adoption would mean that anyone that upvotes, comments or interacts in a meaningful way with the Steemit platform would be rewarded for doing so, regardless if whether they join a guild or not.
There will always be leaders who form focused groups around common interests, but that is still not the masses. Until the common user who mostly consumes information is rewarded significantly, mass adoption will be slow to embrace Steemit.
All these problems can be addressed, but until they are we will need curation guilds and whale support to retain and bolster new users SP until they can stand on their own.
If minnows had more voting influence from day 1, all of these measures would be unnecessary.
I think the main problem is that the system cannot afford to pay the "masses" of new users tons of money just for curating content. If everyone was getting paid a lot, the system would run out of money. I know this is oversimplifying things a bit, but it is probably the main reason why it is not setup this way today.
I would be interested to hear a proposal on how the problem could be solved in such a way that doesn't cost the system a significant amount of money, and does not encourage gaming of the system by opening up lots of little accounts.
You're probably 100% correct about the system not being able to support so many users that do not create content. That's why Steemit will remain a platform for content creators, the 1%, not the consumers.
I would be interested in hearing solutions too, though at the moment I can't think of any within the current rules of the system., other than a new user "buying in" by purchasing Steem Power.
Agreed. Its an important thing to keep thinking about though.