RE: What part of Steem would you never want to change? [Open discussion]
It is important to note that you don't need an inflation-based reward pool to earn with your posts. Literally no other platform economy, let alone any successful ones, pay their users through inflating a currency. We're still early on in an experiment to learn if this is sustainable and can work at all.
While I won't claim to know for sure (although I do believe so), it is very possible that we end up realizing that using inflation and stake creates more harm than good:
- Unsustainable for token value, thus not only harming investors, but users too, as their token earnings also depreciate.
- When rewards depends on stake-based-votes it creates a situation where users are only incentivized to share their content with those who have high SP, since only they can provide valuable votes. This is imo on of the biggest reasons Steem has not grown, as the whole network effect does right there. Literally every other platform gets its strong network effect due to the fact that creators who want to earn has incentives to do the exact opposite: To share their content as far and wide as possible to get more attention.
- It is possible, and I think quite evident, that although distributing rewards through votes can be fun and interesting, it is also really toxic for a social media. People end up getting frustrated with downvotes, and look at the money in votes before they look at whether or not content and interactions felt valuable. Imo it would make more sense to have more traditional voting, and allow reward distribution that is not derived from inflation to happen outside of voting on posts.
But in any case, rewards doesn't have to come from inflation of STEEM. It can be an SMT like @geekgirl said, or even with liquid STEEM (my preferred option. Ideally, there would be an innate patrean-like model on Steem with liquid tokens, or allow communities to earn STEEM through ad-programs, community-related perks, promoted articles, and 20 other ideas I could mention. And then allow that liquid STEEM to be distributed as a community-specific reward pool where a portion goes to content creators and engager, and perhaps some to promote the community, or add features through a community-specific SPS. The options are many, and the reward pool using inflation is needed for nothing.
I don't entirely agree, I think there should be a place for inflation but not being totally dependent on it.
Generally, posts that organically grab mass attention will continue to grab more attention once it's popular. That's why the term "viral" was once used. Not everything pushed to the front page will be viral.
Let's say you have a book and want to advertise it in Steem blockchain, would you advertise on a trending post that has $200 in reward, but has no comments or resteem,
Or would you rather put your ad in a post that has only $1 due to low SP voters but recently received 1000 real comments and resteems and continue to get more interaction?
If you're selling any product you would know that traffic is valuable. And 1000 viewers with medium to low income is better than one very rich viewer
The rich may buy one book, but 1000 people may buy 1000 books.
That's why Steem need to reward posts that get more attention and more engagement because that's where the real money is.
(Example of paywall from yours.org)
Now imagine if Steem allowed you to have posts' paywall that people can buy to view the rest of the content
And what if the trending page was based on the number of times a post has been bought with an algorithm that prevents bots and self payments
What if Steem value was based on content being bought and subscriptions the like of patreon?
What if the reward pool algorithmically reward content that do well in terms of donations?
Now this is really a content/engagement based blockchain that we really want. I envy Lino blockchain for striving to become all that Steem failed to do. Except too bad they are only focusing on video content.
I think inflation is actually a good thing and one of the things that has set Steemit apart.
I agree with your second bullet note about the stake-based votes. It might be combined with a vote count bonus.
I also think that the problems with Steem is that it has been so (ideologically) free that the experiment has been hit with so many clever machinations. Many people have left with a very bad story of corruption and power abuse.
I am not economically educated at all, just my overall view.
Could just create a rewards pool in which 51% of each vote is added to it. Then the pool is distributed daily based on a combination of voted vests, amount of votes(viral posts should receive more)(possible max amount of viral posts per week payout), early curation, resteeming and any/and or all other interaction requirements per day. As the network grows so does the rewards pool.