RE: A case for eliminating curation rewards
How is curation a valuable service? Valuable to whom?
To me the concept of curating is flawed because it forces people to vote for stuff they are not interested in. It goes against the natural will of people. As more and more content gets published on the steem blockchain the less sense it will make to curate, why would you upvote family pics from people you never heard of? People are going to form their own little communities and upvote within that community, curating content on the whole blockchain makes no sense.
It's a valuable service to the community, as many have stated before. Again, that's a function of the current system rather than the concept of curation rewards itself. You are right that in July 2016 the curation landscape was really messed up, and only 20-30 authors were being upvoted regularly. The bots were all swarming to these authors, while the rest of the community went unrewarded.
However, things have changed dramatically since. With the emergence of curation guilds that focused sincerely on quality and seeking out new authors, bots have had to adapt and use clever algorithms to determine quality and vote on posts by new authors. Indeed, this has also encouraged manual curators to vote on good posts they like, because they know a curation guild or whale would be looking out for these posts.
Today, the curation community is so efficient that it is almost impossible for a new author creating good content to go unnoticed for long. This is because the curation rewards allow incentive for intensive curation. Several curators spend several hours every single day trying to find the best quality posts and they'll stop doing so and switch to casual mode without an incentive. Casual mode is where votes keep on piling on the same authors over and over again, with no one bothering to dig to the depths to find great content that was lost.
Without these curators, Steemit would be the wasteland it was in July/Aug 2016. Thousands of users left ignored with zero exposure. Today, while influx of users hasn't happened, many of them have been at least discovered and given a shot at being retained.
I will agree though that with the Communities feature incoming, curation rewards may not be required for voting and could be restructured to actual curation, Communities moderators etc.
There is a nuance between spread and diversify. What you refer to is diversification. I am talking about the weight guilds put on posts, they never vote under 100%. They put all the weight on the posts that they vote to pocket max curation rewards.
This is also demonstrably false. Steem Trail does vote with most posts at 100%, but Curie's average strength has always been about 40%-70%, while Steem Guild was about 25% for many months. Steem Guild has since changed their focus, but your claim of "they never vote under 100%" isn't true at all. That said, the top independent curators blocktrades and abit do vote 100%.
I agree with a lot of things you said , you made a good analysis of the situation.
However to me this is the wrong strategy for mainstream adoption, because it only attracts money opportunists who have no interest in developing their friends/family circle on steemit. They come here with only one purpose which is to make money. This is why steemit is not growing because people see steemit as a site to make money, a bit like gambling, they don't see it as a social media site.
You said
This is good actually. If a new users doesn't get any reward it is a good sign, however when a newbie receives 20 votes at the same time from random stranger the system looks fake af
In any social media site new users have to build their audience, they have to build their communities, their friend,family circle in order to get upvotes. Here on steemit they don't need any of this, it is just a lottery, you post something, sometimes you win sometimes you don't but there is no incentives to build your community.
If curation rewards are eliminated it would allow for natural growth, active users would have more power and people who post here will have to engage more to get upvotes, they will have to bring their family/friends over in order to get upvotes from them, and since users will have more influence it will encourage everyone to buy steem.
If steemit want real growth influence will have to be made available to active users so that these users can build their little communities and grow from there. This is the only way you are going to scale to millions of users and make steemit attractive to the average person.
This site assumes that people want to share stuff with strangers,etc..some people don't want to be part of the whole thing they just want to be with their friends and upvote each other's content. To me this is the only logical way to scale, because it is a natural way, whether their is money or not involved that's how people use social media site.
I feel everything you are looking for is actually achieved by the incentive of curation rewards. I agree with most of it, and I'm confident that curation rewards go some way in achieving our common goal.
The big elephant in the room is the complete lack of concerted marketing and outreach programs to actually bring in new users. Indeed, curation rewards are a novel idea that may encourage millions of users to sign up.
Let's see how the system functions at a representative scale - millions of users. Again, like I said, with the Communities feature coming in the end of the year, we can think of eliminating voting rewards for more direct curation/moderation rewards.
Till then, we'll have to agree to disagree about the impact of curation rewards. :)
Curation rewards encourages people to vote for post outside of their circle/communities, they achieves the opposite of what I am looking for.
Most of the voting is done by people without an incentive because they get near to zero rewards for it anyway. Many people pick up good authors and resteem them to give them exposure, without a financial benefit.
I think people vote because they like the content, and they will continue doing so without financial incentives. Perhaps the ones that vote for incentives/rewards can be missed.
There are very few independent voters with big wallets, I wonder what somebody like @blocktrades would do if there were no curation rewards. Maybe he and his better half would merrily curate along, in the interest of the platform and the price of Steemit.