RE: How can the Steem blockchain distinguish itself in the marketplace?
The hunt for rewards, rewards, rewards through posting, posting, posting has become so fast-paced that it's unfortunately already the case that you write an article that you can virtually forget about the very next day. The day after the "fast voters" were all already there.
So having two tiers for payouts might actually help with that, since the "fast voters" would have to choose whether to vote in the 1-day bracket or the multiday bracket. This means that manual voters might have less competition from the bots. Maybe not, but I think that the 365-day idea from @pennsif is especially interesting in that regard. To be honest, it seems to me that the attention span has always been about a day, no matter what they did with the hard forks. I'm trying to change that with some of the things I'm doing in Popular STEM, but I don't really have enough stake to make much of a splash.
I honestly don't think the payout length matters much to the quality of the content. We think that authors create content, but maybe that's not really true. Maybe it's the curators who create the content by signaling the things that they'll vote for. If a high-value curator signals that (s)he'll vote for pictures of your lunch, we'll have lots of lunch pictures. Doesn't matter if the payout comes in 1 day or 7.
But... and this is why I suggested it, a 1-day payout might draw quality producers in from the derivative chains.
On this point, my feeling is different. In the "old days" there were not so many "daily bloggers". Of those, a few were good writers, with most you quickly noticed why they blogged daily. And so it was easier to follow your feed. If I - out of interest - followed someone, I also took the time to deal with his article later (just when the time window fit with me) (actually, as I did it after the first skim now with your text). And I had the feeling that users did this also "for me". Today it often seems to me that some "mass producers" have already forgotten their article from, let's say three days ago, themselves.
Users loyal to their own work do so.
Sure. And that's what the masses respond to, and we get to read a clear majority of the same unattractive material.
Isn't that sad? And unfortunately also proof that the balance between interaction based on "social media" and pure profit thinking has been lost here.
But to return to the point of payout time. Presumably - with different points of view, a change to one day will make neither better nor worse. But we can only verify that if it is tried.
So: Courage to hardfork (after more than three years)!