RE: Revisiting Curation Reward: Hot Coffee, Cold Coffee, and Lukewarm Coffee
But the difference is they are more likely to "create" contents while curators basically consume contents.
Actually, no. Voters provide tiny fragments of information that are all gathered up and used in the curation process. If we discourage voting, we'll be left with passive readers who provide even less value than voters (if we're lucky).
Please tell us another example from economics where quality is improved by eliminating incentives or creating disincentives.
You may say finding good contents is also a hard work. Then, in the current system, does majority of voters put meaningful efforts to find good contents? Some may do but at least voting bots pursuing curation rewards don't.
Voters should not be expected to work hard. Small rewards == small work. Maybe one voter is a stickler for grammar. Maybe another wants to support a particular category. Maybe another likes the color blue and the number 17. It's the aggregate of all those diverse and incomplete voting decisions that becomes the curated product. For better decisions, we need more voter diversity, not less.
Please tell us another example from technology, business, or social sciences where unassisted humans provide better quality than humans with tools.
This is yes and no, which is my point. Voters who don't read post, don't get any satisfactions, but just upvote provide any information about content itself. Their sign is mainly about payouts, e.g. if an author obtain high payouts repeatedly this type of voters are highly possible to upvote. I basically agree it has less financial incentives for other human voters. However, I expect their dissatisfaction from voting bots (e.g. concentration of votes on same authors) will be reduced and the overall they have more benefit.
My point is differentiating incentives into financial and psychic. However, if there's any way to enforce people to read posts to vote, I rather support it. Unfortunately, this is impossible on blockchain.
If you want to more understand my statement, please look at the number of votes and number of views on this post.
Imagine that I'm a fiction writer, and I want steemit to be a more welcoming place for other fiction writers, so I write a bot to upvote every post in the fiction category, whether I read it or not. Maybe I put in some basic checks for grammar and image files and length of article. Over time, I begin refining my bot to become more sophisticated about the content that it votes for. Even though I didn't read those articles, I still derive satisfaction from those votes. I'm also representing the views of some other group of non-voters, who would be attracted to the platform (if my votes prevail). It's the curation rewards that tell me (and steemit) how much of the community shares my interest (leaving aside the [n2] distortion). It's also the curation rewards that enable the whales (major longer-term stakeholders) to shape the platform content. Anyway, even if curation rewards didn't provide those services, shouldn't I get rewarded for my acts of representation?
And there is the crux of it. You don't like the way people are voting, so you want to force them to vote differently or stop voting. Even though, as @sigmajin already pointed out, the bandwagon voters don't actually influence rewards distribution anyway. And what are you going to do when you take away curation rewards and people continue to vote in ways that you don't like?
Those votes don't count. They're just here for the profit. ; -)
Edit: To put it simply, using this framework, your proposal might decrease Type-I voting errors, but it would do it at the cost of a huge increase in Type-II voting errors. IMO, that trade-off is contrary to the health of the platform.
Your framework borrowed from statistics is interesting, and thanks for your example. But please take my point: the issue is mixture of motivation. If you want to upvote every post in fiction tag, that's not because you want to maximize your curation reward but because you have some satisfaction from doing that.
@sigmajin's post is interesting too. But if no curation reward exist, the $160 might go to other posts by for-content curators. So they already meaningfully influence reward distribution, as well as voting counts.
The problems I perceive are, our filtration system for good contents are distorted by hybrid motivation. At least 500 bots (clues from votes on @steemvoter's posts. Maybe less but still hundreds I think) are round and casting votes for "profit", not for "quality of contents".