RE: @snowflake's really interesting proposal - Turn whales into moderators and give dolphins all the voting power (TLDR Version)
I found this idea to be interesting and very creative. But, as I said on @snowflake's original post, I do feel that this would be quite a burden on the whales and could end up making their experience more negative than positive.
It does feel great to be able to give someone a reward, which is why when more of us are able to do that, a lot more users will come pouring in.
I made a post about three months ago where I proposed incentivizing powering up by offering a premium service to all users that have powered up over x amount per month.
As a rough example;
Power up over 1000 STEEM per month and you would receive benefits such as being able to renew your posts, either once a day or once per post. This means you could press a button and your post would return to the top of the new list as if you just posted it, because retaining visibility is difficult. I feel people would really love to have this advantage.
Adding up to seven tags per post.
There were more but, I don't recall them now as I have not really woken up properly yet.
The point is that those who have powered up over said amount per month have a little advantage as a reward for investing in the platform and in STEEM.
I feel that this would encourage users to not only power up their liquid STEEM into SP, but some would also be buying up STEEM on the market place so as to reach the target and ensure they also got the premium service in the following month.
You could also have a Get premium service insantly option where a user wouldn't have to waste till next month if they had $50 SBD or something, which would help to reduce some of the debt.
This is just a working concept, as I haven't gave it as much thought as I should have. But, I think that the answer to quicker SP redistribution, to increasing STEEM power holdings, to increasing demand for STEEM, and to raising the value of STEEM, is giving people a reason to power up.. Because the current prospect of being able to maybe give someone a reward of 1 cent after powering up for months is not really a good one at all.
So there are some differences between @snowflake's original proposal and the one in my post. One of the main ones is that whales would still get to keep 100 MV worth of SP to upvote posts as a 'regular' user. Basically it would just cap the amount of rewards that they could give out, so that whales and large dolphins are on the same footing.
The major difference is that the whales would also have the ability to moderate, and they would be getting a somewhat significant 'moderator reward' as an incentive to keep their moderator status as opposed to splitting up into a bunch of little accounts.
This is not mutually exclusive with the idea being proposed here. There is nothing saying that both could not be done.
I'm not a huge fan of the idea by itself, because IMO I don't think the incentives are high enough to encourage a large scale of users to power up huge amounts of SP. If all they get is a few small perks, they will just power up the minimum amount to get the perks, and then after they have the perks they might as well power it back down as soon as they get a chance.
I would see benefit to this also being implemented by requiring a certain level of SP to receive (and keep) certain benefits once they reach a certain amount of SP, or by providing more benefits to burning SBD.
Yes, that could be even better. As I said, it's not something I have given a huge amount of thought but if you can improve upon the idea so quickly then I am curious to see how well it could be refined with more brains and more thoughts.
I just feel that incentizing power ups should be the main priority, because doing so will get rid of most of the other problems we see on the platform.
More vest = less selling pressure, Incentive = higher demand. The two combined = quickly rising price of STEEM. This would naturally increase a dolphin and minnows influence in regards to rewards.
If you're able to give a penny now, how much will you be able to give should STEEM go back up to 4 dollars? A few times I have been able to click upvote and see a penny appear. I removed the upvote and did it again just to be sure it was my vote that did it.
I know this only happened because it was right below the penny mark, making mine appear to be giving the entire penny.. But, nonetheless it's a surprisingly satisfying feeling just to see that after having a completely ineffective vote.
I think if the price of STEEM is increased through this sort of thing, then even minnows will be able to give cents here and there, and dolphins dollars, and this will inspire people to want to be able to see their votes reward even more- leading to more powering up.
I just think it's something worth discussing further. I definitely like your idea too, as long as the goal is not too difficult to achieve, because then it will do wonders to keep new users on the platforms.
Might be best to have bronze, silver, gold, platinum and graphene level users, determined by how much has been directly powered up, not by STEEM power earned through posting. Then people will always have something to work towards, and a new perk once it is achieved.
A lot of thought is being put in behind the scenes on different ways to introduce 'gamification' and incentivize investment/power ups.
Agreed.
I am 99% sure that price of STEEM has a linear effect on the amount of your payouts. If I am giving out a penny today and the price of STEEM went back to $4.00, I would likely give out 26 cents per upvote. (This also changes based on the other voters that are voting too due to the n^2 algorithm.)
I'm in support.
Well I am excited to see what will happen in the next few months then.
And yes, I assumed it would be linear, I was just too lazy to do the maths. thanks for doing ti for me.
the next few months is probably a bit overly optimistic as far as the timeline, but yes I am excited for these types of changes as well :)
Just wanted to clarify. In my proposal the inflation that is currently allocated to 'users' would also get removed. Only moderators would receive inflation in proportion to their SP. This means that the more moderators accounts were to become 'users' accounts, the more inflation moderators would receive. It's an added incentive for moderators to stay moderators.
Yes.