Revamping Curation Is The Way To Increase Steem Power Demand
Revamping Curation Is The Way To Increase Steem Power Demand
If you haven’t been living under a rock, for the past month or so, it has been quite clear that the price of Steem has been rapidly falling. Although before the run up to $4 was most likely in a bubble and the system is in no danger of failing, as it has worked at this price before, I still believe there is a long term solution that needs to be found to fix this problem. Ned made a post yesterday talking about ideas he had, which mostly, in my opinion focused on lowering the supply entering the market, but this is only a symptom of the problem. My solution although a bit drastic addresses the problem which is a lack of incentive to purchase Steem and power up.
To begin, what are the incentives now? Well the main incentive is having weight while voting, as well as getting a daily return on the Steem Power you have in the system. These might seem like adequate incentives in theory, but in practice I think we are seeing something very different. The problem right now is even with the daily interest we are getting on our Steem Power, we have still been losing money due to the price drops. The interest, which is supposed to act like inflation protection, is actually doing nothing because as long as the price is falling, people are not going to want to move their Steem dollars or Steem into Steem Power. We need to give a greater incentive to hold and purchase Steem Power that will benefit us as a community in the long run. Sure we can wait for the price to fall and have people cash out and make it cheaper to enter the system, but this still doesn’t address the underlying problem.
So what is my solution? I strongly believe we need to move the payout split to 50:50 between authors and curators from the current 75:25 it is at. I know this will be controversial, especially because many authors today, INCLUDING MYSELF, are making essentially a living off the site, but ultimately it comes down to what is best for the community. We need to look at who is adding more value to the site, the authors or the curators. Depending on who you ask their answer might be different, but in my opinion both are equally as important. One cannot survive without the other and the payouts should reflect that.
Curating is supposed to be a heavy incentive for people to enter the system, but the earnings from it are subpar at best. For example, I have 20,000 Steem Power and my average earnings per day is around 6 Steem Power. That means my daily return on investment is .03% a day and only around 11% a year and that is with a pretty profitable curating strategy. Sure it will technically come out to a bit higher than 11% due to compounding but it still won’t make that much of a difference. A huge selling point to me was that if you choose to curate rather than create content you will also be able to earn a sufficient amount, but no one is going to put 20,000 Steem into Steem Power that they would have to wait 2 years to pull out if the reward of waiting is not sufficient enough. Selling Steemit as a platform where the users who upvote the content are equally as valuable as the users who create the content makes users actually want to buy Steem and convert it into Steem Power.
We should not focus on slowing down the supply that enters the market, but rather retaining and creating new users that will become active daily. Once people have upvotes that actually mean something we will see people flock to the system. Rather than just browsing reddit and upvoting, with no return, they would have a much better experience here. The majority of the people on the site are not authors but lurkers or readers and we need to cater specifically to that crowd because they will end up as the masses, should more come. Authors deserve to be paid for their work but the percentage of money that goes to payouts is a lot.
Like I stated before, I have been very successful and Steemit which is why I want to cut down my rewards, because if we continue in the direction we are currently going, it will become a race to the bottom , at which point everyone will leave. I strongly believe that splitting the curation rewards and author rewards equally can benefit the demand for Steem power in the long run and cause a higher amount of user retention within the system.
-Calaber24p
Yes the old curation system works quite great and it's the strongest selling point of SP, IMHO. After changing to the new curation, these are a lot of people complaining and totally stop upvoting. You could find a lot of posts about that problem.
Definitely true.
I hate to admit this is probably right...
We may lose some authors over it. But we won't lose the good ones.
Minimal IMO. I really doubt the 1/3 reduction would be make-or-break for more than tiny number of cases, if any.
I appreciate the discussion, but I don't believe curation should be 50:50 with the way curation currently exists. Curation is a bots game currently, and that would have to be changed first (with the proposed 0.14 changes perhaps), for me to get behind an idea like this.
Right now we have bots that are powering down millions of vests a week and regaining the entire balance powered down simply by curating. This won't stop them, this will only make that behavior more popular.
I could see 50:50 maybe being viable is the changes in 0.14 go through, but right now there's push back on that as well.
Also - writing is harder than curation, why should it be an equal split?
I've seen this claim repeatedly made. It appears false. My power down rate is currently 20K/week. I'm making 3K/week with a combination of light botting and manual curation. @berniesanders is making 4K/week. @wang is apparently the most successful bot relative to SP and is making 2K/week while powering down 4K/week.
Seems there should be snopes page on this :)
More importantly though, voting for curation rewards is a competitive activity. There is always someone who is going to be the best at it. Looking at that one individual during one particular time window is not a good way to assess the effect of the mechanism across the overall system. This is no difference from balance in games. There might be a few excellent players with very high K/D ratios (imperfections of that metric noted), but that fact alone does not imply the game is unbalanced at all.
The rewards for reading are split among potentially hundreds or thousands of voters.
@smooth You are the No. 1 VESTS gainer last month without posting any. Increase of curation reward will surely increase your earning but it will discourage many good writers IMHO.
1/3 reduction in posting rewards will discourage "many good writers"? I doubt it. Which ones, exactly, will quit if they earn 1/3 less? (Or maybe that won't even happen because better curation rewards will engage more users and attract more investors as OP suggested, increasing the size of the pool.)
As for my own rewards, those were achieved only using a paid staff of 10 curators (some working close to full time) with much of the rewards going back to them as salary and bonuses. I've since had to cut back on paid curation because the economics no longer support it.
I'm now working on a revised and downscaled program with less risk and exposure for me. As curation becomes more competitive and as the size of the reward pool in VESTS shrinks each day it, becomes tougher and tougher to justify high level professional curators (who IMO did a great job which included finding some great posts that did extremely well once promoted, but sat undiscovered for 10 hours in some cases).
There is no free lunch here.
I disagree that we would lose good writers. We may lose some writers alright, but not the good ones. The fact that we're getting paid at all is revolutionary, and I agree that the curator should be valued as much as the writer. My writing has no value without those who read it and those who promote it.
My only concern is with the ongoing distribution. With increased curation rewards for whales and decreased author rewards for minnows, wouldn't this increased the disparity between whales and minnows?
And as you've said before, one of your reasons for powering down is to try to spread the rewards more evenly. I have absolutely nothing against whales powering down and it's my belief that if the system were to discourage whales from doing this, this would further discourage investors. However, I can see that from those who cannot see what's going on from the outside, from the markets point of view it just doesn't look good. So I'm wondering how we can address this to make potential buyers aware that with steem this trend is different from when you see it with other cryptocurrencies.
Also, as suggested by one of my brothers who are here on steemit, perhaps we need further incentive not just for whales, but for minnows to buy steem. Website perks for example might be a good way to attract a small amount of investment from a lot of minnows. Since becoming a dolphin feels like a goose chase without using your money, because of the difference between a $10 and a $3000 account. If there were better incentives to try to reach an $P of $500 worth, we might see a lot more users reaching into their pockets.
Distribution in the form of rewards is too slow to matter very much. Over the next year approximately 20 million STEEM will be distributed in rewards (both content and curation rewards) and the total money supply will reach about 300 million. Under any conceivable scheme a very large portion of the 20 million will go to very large SP holders (including some who are successful posters as well). The only really significant redistribution that can possibly happen is though the market. I don't consider this a good reason to cut rewards for voting across the board, large and small alike, which is what cutting the size of the pool does.
Good question. I don't know of easy answers here. 95% of the stake is owned by roughly 1% of the users. There's no fast or painless way to spread that out. I guess time and confidence that things will work out longer-term is the best we can do.
I don't believe you are sharing your post key (of smooth) with your curator team. Are your referring teamsmooth?
I think we should push for a change where a user can delegate a percentage of their SP voting power to a user along with a percentage split of curation rewards. For example if you wanted to delegate 20% of your SP to 4 good curators, and keep 20% for yourself you could. You could start by giving them an 80/20 split, and increase their split percentage as a reward for doing a good job.
@clayop
The way it worked is the team members submitted candidate posts to me and I vote for them myself using the web site, as well as adding some of their identified authors to a list for automated voting. I received the rewards and paid the team members for their work from other funds (since rewards are SP and can't be transferred).
I was in the process of creating a different process using mulitple posting keys for the various team members when the economics shifted in a manner that discouraged further investment in curation infrastructure, so that work is on hold for now. I'm still accepting post recommendations and voting manually, though at a lower rate than previously (in part because the market has become much more competitive with multiple curation teams operating; I'm an investor and supporter of one of them).
I'm currently working on a new initiative with my curation team that should start going within the next few days. The process and curation goals will be slightly different than before, and more in tune with the current market.
If curation bring in more Steem owners and price goes up 1/3 it could be net postitive for authors.
I fully agree with @beanz. From the market site steem as investment doesnt look good with the inflation of at least 100% per year. Even if 90% is given back to Steem power holders, still the market graph looks going down for an outsider. The hyper inflation also destroys the incentive to use steem as currency or to provide liquidity.
Reduce steem inflation rate drastically
Therefore i would suggest to reduce the inflation of steem dramatically to 10% per year. 5% could go to steem power holders.
Reduce the time period you must hold steem power drastically
Also I would suggest to drastically change the time period that you must hold steem power to at max one year.
Give incentives for users that verify their identity
We should also think about giving incentives for new users that fully verify their identity. This could look like the following: If you verified your identity, you get 30% interest per month, until the value of your steem power equals 500 steem dollars.
Give incentives for using steem dollars to buy something
Also we should think about incentives for buying something with steem or steem dollars. For example you get up to 10% of the purchase price if you buy something from an verified steem merchant.
There is such way on traditional markets, they call it credit
If I put 20 hours per week into posting material that makes roughly $60 a week, and suddenly this is cut by one third, but I still have to put the same amount of work in to write good quality content... Many people value their time more than money @smooth.
the "game"/"money making scheme" is nice to those who benefit from it, but I thought steemit was a social media, meaning where people interact.
What good (to the author/community) does it do to the upvoting of something no one read ?
Because a bot upvoting, means just that, no human read the post. It was upvoted based over criteria which have nothing to do with interest (mostly based on author rep or stuff like that).
And it will be upvoted for the same reason by most of the upvoters, curation reward not because the article is good or was a good read... In terms of social media it is in my opinion a fail
It is described, I think, as incentivized social media. It is clearly not exactly the same as regular social media and is more of a hybrid between that and cryptocurrency mining (as in "blogging is the new mining").
But if we are to accept this, doesn't it mean that a large portion of the quality content creators out there won't be drawn to the platform? If this is the proper understanding of the platform, then there's no reason for good writers and creators to come here. Visibility is likely a higher priority for creators/artists than the money - especially those who are trying to build followings. If curating is only for gaming purposes, then it makes no sense to try to attract writers by trying to market to them with the claims that they can "get paid for quality content." They won't be getting paid for quality content. They'll simply have a chance to be paid for being the most easily gamed by bots.
@ats-david
I'm not really sure if you are trolling but come on. The content that gets voted up for most part is the most popular stuff. More people think it is the best quality, or at least most of-interest to them. Take follower count for example, which presently has no reason to be gamed in this system (though elsewhere in social media it does and I'm sure it will here). @dollarvigilante has almost 3000 followers. A lot of people here like him and think his work is quality. So when he gets voted up that is exactly quality work being voted up, even though it happens in practice by a combination of people and bots (controlled by people). Similar comments could be made about @gavvet, @charlieshrem, @heiditravels, etc. Even @msgivings who was a highly divisive author and had an issue with plagiarism, was widely followed and her posts consistently had very active comment sections. People here like them and appreciate their work.
If you think you're the next Bethoven and your musical symphony scores are top "quality" and should be voted up, well you are one person who thinks that, and you might even be "right" in some philosophical quality sense, but the system is unlikely to reward you accordingly if no one else knows about you or cares about your work.
Now if your issue is that whales control all the stake and have different opinions about who or what should be voted up than you do or some other users do, my answer is the same as it has been every time this has been discussed: We need to redistribute the stake (via selling).
Finally, if your claim its all bots and nobody actually likes the stuff that gets voted up, I disagree. See above.
It is a game yes, but it is a game that results in the most popular authors and content consistently getting the most votes, along with fairly consistent successes from hidden gems. That's both the intent of the design and the results we see in practice (again see above). Is there a better system that exists? I doubt it. Go post on Facebook or Twitter with no followers and see if you have any significant chance whatsoever to get a lot of exposure (you don't). At least here there is a constant ongoing effort (because that effort has the potential be rewarded) by those who are digging through hundreds and thousands of junk posts to find a few that look like that have a lot of potential and voting them up, which in turn starts to give them exposure and shot.
That's probably the best example, which proves it is can be true. Just because @wang is the only one who can accomplish this right now (that we know of), doesn't mean everyone won't be able to in the future. How does that make the statement false?
The entire reason I mentioned bots is that if we went to a 50:50 split, it would make it even more possible to power down and completely regenerate that value simply by running a bot. @wang as an example would jump immediately from making 2k/week to 4k/week, which is what he powers down.
I feel like you and I both play the "devils advocate" roll a lot ;)
That wasn't the original claim:
The original claim was off by power of two in the case of @wang. Also, a lot of this is natural, even structural, early-adopter dynamics. Ignoring competitive factors (see @owdy's reply), the reward pool is fixed in STEEM/day but SP inflates by about 5% per week. The two are inevitably diverging.
This is not devil's advocate, it is simply false (as far as I know) that people are currently making as much from curation as they are powering down. @wang, so far the tightest ratio so far identified is lagging by a factor of two, and others are lagging even more.
Finally even if it were true, would it matter? Imagine that power down were extended from 104 to 208 weeks (both arbitrary numbers). In that case curation would indeed currently match power down for @wang, but so what? How about 1040 weeks? 52 weeks? All these comparisons are arbitrary and meaningless.
Let me make one last point. Any linear change in curation does not change the balance between larger, smaller, dumber, smarter, human, or bot curators, it simply affects everyone's rewards proportionately. When we cut @wang's rewards in half we also cut in half the rewards for every modest-SP user on the site (which is most of them), and likewise for doubling them. This particular change is entirely neutral to whether these rewards are too top heavy or bot-friendly.
I would also guess that content rewards are probably as top-heavy as curation rewards, if not more so. Clearly people like @dollarvigilante, @charlieshrem, etc. are earning faster from content rewards than they are powering down. Why is it considered acceptable for them but not for curators? Again I would say the comparison between the two rates is arbitrary and meaningless.
THIS^^^^
@jesta
The ratios do not change significantly over a short time period (only about 5% divergence per week) and not at all if you measure both rewards and power down using the same units.
Come on, that's completely silly! He voluntarily reduced his powering down rate to match his reward rate. Every single user who ever earns a reward at whatever rate whatsoever can do that!
It is also seriously cherry-picked BTW. Depending on which particular time period you choose on that chart you can get the result to increase, decrease, or stay the same!
I think the most important point you are missing is that rewards denominated in VESTS decrease single every day. Everyone here now, including @wang, is an "early miner" in a sense and we are all benefiting from the rewards being much larger than they will be in the future. That short-term fact shouldn't be used as a basis for system design.
@jesta
Likewise!
You're talking about SP, I'm talking about VESTS. That 2.5k SP he powered down this week is the equivalent to 7.8125 million VEST. That's exactly what my original claim was about. I still don't see where the statement was false, maybe I'm just dense. Where's this power of two you speak of?
It's true if you look at it from a monthly perspective. Here's wang's ~30 days history, the red line is VESTS:
3 power downs, 1 week of no power downs, and only curation. It's pretty much even. If you want to run the numbers yourself, here's an API endpoint with every day's snapshot:
https://steemdb.com/api/account/wang/snapshots
My entire point was that if we went from 75/25, to 50/50, that the red line in the chart above would be increasing faster. I am not against early adopters making some profit, we're all early adopters here. I'm also not against bots, but I do think they should be kept in check.
In my opinion - yes, it would. As I learn more about the subject, it may not matter to me anymore, but currently my perception (and others) feel this is a problem.
Thanks for the good discussions on the topic :)
@smooth - Points taken, and thank you again for engaging in this topic so far with me. Regardless of the point by point back and forth we're having, I also think that fundamentally you and I are seeing this from different perspectives.
But you're right. I drove this comment thread by starting to talk about bots and curation, which is a totally separate topic from the actual rewards structure itself. They play off one another, but ultimately shouldn't dictate the direction of one another.
Just a note on this - It's just the timeframe I have currently since I've started recording. I don't have more complete data, and I doubt anyone else does either. I'm not cherry picking on purpose, I'm just using what I have as an example.
Can the bots be a positive for the indirect distribution of SP. What if the Whales use bots to follow volunteers that find new users with good content. The Whales can't do it all by themselves. They set their power to vote the same as the volunteer at a certain percentage. (Slide Scale) Maybe they can even divide the SP to their own secondary account to follow more volunteers. They are keeping their own SP but just voting with the volunteer.
These volunteers would have some stipulations for votes. Don't vote for themselves, don't vote for users over a certain amount of up votes or dollars already awarded in a post, look for new users with quality content.
Say a Whale had two volunteers doing the searching and voting for 20 posts, meeting their criteria, with what ever percent on the sliding scale they want. That's 40 votes a day and spreading their power by their bot just voting the same as their volunteers.
I'm just trying to think of ways to help. And I try and think, If I had this kind of power, I would want to spread it out as far as I can to benefit the community. From what I understand the bots could do this....
Anyway .... Just an idea. :)
Pk
There are all sorts of things going on in this system, bots being used in different ways, humans voting for all sorts of reasons, comments being made to attract votes to themselves or to the post, etc. I don't think we really have a full grasp of it all, and our understanding will likely decrease going forward. Large complex systems with complex interactions, feedback loops, and competition quickly become impossible to fully understand.
@smooth Exactly and that is just taking account of conscious human motivations. It is hard to know the unconscious motivations and behaviours that people will engage in.
I'm pretty sure this was the case about a month ago. For at least a couple of weeks, @wang was making over 6k SP/week when he was still voting at 14 mins. Ever since he cut down on his upvote delay, the bot game has been a lot more challenging for everyone.
See my reply to @jesta. Not only is this a matter of increasing competition but also structural inflation. The rewards are getting effectively smaller, by design (until a floor is reached but not for quite a while).
I do agree that a 50/50 split would make the curation 'game' more appealing, and would provide additional incentive for users to power up. My issue with it is this though:
Even though the curation reward is being split amongst hundreds of thousands of voters, it is really the big whales who are getting 99% of the curation rewards. Even a good dolphin curator with 5-10k worth of SP who maximizes their curation by somehow voting on posts that all get upvoted by whales, will only see a very tiny portion of the curation rewards from the posts.
The "little guy" curator will still not have much incentive to power up, because even with increased curation rewards - their portion is so minuscule that it won't really matter. It seems like in the end it will help the rich get/stay richer, but offer very little to average users who can not afford to buy in 100k worth of SP.
This problem is solved by redistribution (i.e. whale selling). As long as <1% of the users own 95% of the SP (source: https://steemd.com/distribution), everything else will follow along in this same (broken) proportions.
Spread the stake, then the system can work really well, not before.
As I said elsewhere, linear changes in curation (specifically cutting it in half or doubling it) do not in any way change the proportions that are going to various demographic segments. Cutting whales' curation in half does not help anything if it also cuts non-whales curation in half (or worse, pushes non-whales below the minimum floor where they go no curation rewards whatsoever), and that is what was done.
And finally, what is happening by piling on even more content rewards? A few very successful bloggers are concentrating the bulk of the rewards, amassing huge portions of stake, becoming the next whales, and still not helping the little guy (btw, many of them are using automated voting now). This is not really solving the problem either.
Nevertheless, despite this ongoing issue, even in this thread I see non-whales discussing curation and their strategies for performing it as a compelling form of engagement.
@smooth True! Infact little dolphins can make significant SP/month; easily compare infovore and charlieshrem (very new btw) with equivalent SP and followers but significant differences in curation return.
I also manually curate 6.7 SP/week & from where I am from that pays my coffee all week )).
I totally agree.
What level do you currently need to be at though in order to make any serious money from curation rewards though? 50k? Does cutting that from 50k to 25k really provide much more incentive to power up? Regardless of whether the split it is 75/25 or 50/50, I think the threshold of SP needed to really make a difference is so high, that nobody other than a huge investor is going to see this change as an attraction to power up.
I don't completely agree. While most of the rewards are going to a handful of contributors, there are still a significant number of small users who are getting a lot of SP from posting. I think way more users are gaining SP from authoring than from curating. With a 50/50 split, less money would be going to low SP holders through posting, and more would go to high SP holders who get the bulk of the curation rewards.
you are an exception in that you are a whale that actually cares about curation. i think the biggest problem with Steem currently is that curation power wasn't optimally distributed and those that have it either don't want the power or aren't well equipped to have it: https://steemit.com/steem/@ntomaino/optimally-distributing-curation-power
I agree with your post except that I wouldn't say I'm the only whale interested in curation or even necessarily the one most interested. Several of the others vote very acively and @berniesanders is backing the Curie Project which seems to be an excellent curation program. Nevertheless, yes, we need redistribution. The proposal in the OP helps support this goal by giving people more of a reason to buy.
You're not the only, but are of the few. I appreciate the work @berniesanders is doing as well in protecting the integrity of curation power and not hesitating to downvote posts that compromise the integrity of curation power.
because it is harder to put hard earned money to SP !!!
Exactly writing is much harder than reading the content.
Not all the time, have you seen some of the shit on here?
its not an equal split. 50% to one person compared to 50% divided between 400?
It's an equal split between the author and the curators (plural). I never meant to imply it was a direct equivalence between all curators and the author :P
I just saying people won't do shit for a fraction of a cent.
The vast majority of people will still only get a fraction of a cent, except doubled, if we went to 50/50.
0.001 SBD * 2 is still only 0.002
This change won't make curation worth it for people who don't earn much to begin with.
This is only because the rewards are so low only a bot can justify doing it. Encouraging commenting would also be a way to improve activity. I still think bots would be disadvantaged if you got more curation rewards for posts that were above "consensus" for a poster. Consensus is based on posters history rep score etc. all trailing info. Bots are not good at reason and curating hence Bo's don't vote for newbies.
Nailed it. Content is not worth much. You can always paste from another site you run. See all the crypto news sites. Honestly it should probably be 75-25 in favor of curation. Activity and dare I say attention is what makes this a valuable platform. Every move has so far reduced activity. Hopefully the next steps will increase activity and I include curation in the list of activity.
I would do 50percent curation 25percent comments and 25 percent orginal poster if you want activity.
Every improvement to site should explain how it increases activity (reading, voting, commenting and posting)
Agree with just about everything in your comment (though not sure about 75-25). I would add, though, that "posting", at least as it currently exists in this system, is without question the least important and widely practiced component of activity. Most people are not and never will be expert writers/bloggers, world travelers, etc. capable of creating amazing original content on a regular basis. We need to refocus on "activity" with a much wider base of participation.
Funny i almost left out posting but thought it wasn't fair to leave it out of activity. I agree it's least important.
Thank you @smooth! I joined this platform about 3 months ago and my activity here has been incredibly high, my work ethic is insane and I put much energy in something I feel promising. Not that anyone cares but if you or anyone noticed my recent productivity here it has dropped not due to the fact I don't enjoy this platform but energy giving out needs to have some type of energy coming in at some point. I have over 1500 post of course comments are included and all my comments are relative to the topic and has major value 90% of time if not all. If I had the funds to deposit massive steem I would be a human bot curator that bots would want to get rid of, I love reading and learning being on steemit is made for me. If activity dictated rewards I would be a "Whale"
Yeah giving more to the curators attracting more people into steemit may just be more beneficial for the content creators in the long run anyways. I think this change is needed, curation rewards definitely need to go up for minnows, I'm not complaining mine have been decent but that's because I have 14000SP. I can only imagine how discouraging it can be to vote day after day and make fuck all day after day.
CONTENT IS KING
I support this. I opposed the change from 50% to 25% for various reasons including simply rewarding voters more.
I stated at the time (and this can be found in the old #witness slack logs) that after switching from 50/50 to 75/25 (or even more so the 90/10 that was thrown out as a trial balloon at one point), the asymmetry creates a natural incentive to switch it back. That's because going from 25 to 50 doubles curation rewards (and earnings for all of those voting, large and small) while it reduces content rewards by only 33%. The farther you get from 50/50 the more leverage there is in the effectiveness of rewarding that segment of the user base by moving back toward 50/50.
There are other effects from shifting too much of rewards to content, basically none desirable, unless the objective is to attract extremely successful bloggers who need a large paycheck to be interested. For everyone else, extremely large content rewards are basically useless. (Even for successful bloggers, the 50% increase that comes from 50->75 is not a game changer.)
Good post and thank you for the original thought, since you were apparently unaware that the original design worked this way.
I think you have the wrong idea here. Steem going down isn't the problem, the problem is that we let it go up too quickly.
Here's what people need to understand: your blogs aren't worth what you're getting paid, and your work as a curator isn't worth what you're getting paid either.
The biggest issue with that is that people who thought these payouts could last are/will be disappointed when we return to an equilibrium.
Sure, your blog might get paid a bit more here per reader than on other platforms, since there's no company taking a cut of the revenue it creates, but when it reaches an equilibrium, it won't be anywhere close to what it is right now (at least with the current userbase). That equilibrium could be an order of magnitude lower.
Curation shouldn't be seen as a way to make money. It should be a small + to using the platform.
"You've curated content for a year? Here, have an extra $20 for your work on the platform."
Now that might be closer to what we should expect. If you're looking at it this way, no increase in % given to curation will make this appealing to investors. The reason for powering up should be influence, and let me tell you that influence on a platform with ~10k active users isn't worth all that much.
One more point, people will power down until their holdings match what they'd be willing to invest in the platform (say if they'd just heard about it). A lot of "Steem millionnaires" will want to drop their stake down to a tiny fraction of what it is right now.
Agree with most everything you said, but I still believe curation rewards should be 50%. Even if that only makes the difference between $10 for the year or $20, that difference still matters.
It also does make an important difference to the value of STEEM because it determines the rate of dilution. Content rewards go to authors (successful bloggers for the most part) and dilute SP holders as a class. Curation rewards come back to SP holders as a class. The change that cut curation rewards in half (actually more) had a significant impact on the value of STEEM, even if not specifically cutting the value in half (because of the remaining value from influence; also long term potentially network access)
Alright I see your point. Might not make a huge difference per investor, but as a whole it does.
IMO curators are also much more likely to keep their Steem powered up than authors, so it would make sense to have a larger part of that pie go to them.
Makes sense, yes. Because it affects their earnings. For authors it mostly doesn't (it does buy influence so authors can promote their own posts, but established authors don't really need this).
Hello @calaber24p, I just stopped by to let you know that I included this post in my favourite reads on my Steemit Ramble today. Seems you've hit a nerve with this post, I read it just after you posted and an hour later it is going crazy. I'll be back to read the comments more thoroughly. Nice work.
The post can be found here
Interesting that you suggest this as it was the original design.
I actually didnt even know this Dan. But I think it makes much more sense to have the split 50/50. If we dont value the lurkers and readers then there will be nobody left to stay around to actually read the content the authors are putting out. Like I said I have made a nice amount of money from being an author but im willing to give up that extra 25% cut to add more inclusion into the system. I dont want steemit to fail because it fails to retain users. I think you guys have a fantastic working system and that we are just a few tweaks and changes from making it more impacting.
What about dynamic reward percentages?
The reputation of the author?
For example
If someone with a reputation of 70 submits a post, the author:curation would be 50:50
If someone with a reputation of 50 submits a post, the author:curation would be 75:25
The potential Payout of the post
For example
If the potential payout of the post is > $1000, the author:curation would be 50:50
If the potential payout of the post is <= $1000, the author:curation would be 75:25
Sounds good in theory old bean (there is no English dandy monocle emoticon at this time, somebody should be working on that and a Oni).
I think that the proposal has the right idea (making SP seem more appealing by adding more value to having it) but it is going after the wrong part of the problem. I think the main thing preventing a lot of investment is that there is not much value to have a medium sized amount of SP. If a user buys 5k worth of SP, they can only earn a few cents per day through curation, and their votes only give authors a small amount too. The solution being proposed to change curation from 25/75 to 50/50 would really only benefit the very large SP holders, who get most of the curation rewards from the posts. For a small sized user, I think a lot of people think "what is the point of investing 1k". If we could figure out a way to make that more attractive, I think there would be a lot more small investors ready to buy in.
really well i have just powered up at this unbeatable price of steem right now by 1300 to my steem power to help improve on my return !! I am not a writer it would seem but i love the site and believe in what steemit will do once it gets really off the ground !! This idea would be a great help for people like me who are here for the long run and who have invested money but get little back through the post rewards !! Please Dan consider this valid idea !! Would certainly be a great incentive to bring in a new breed of curators for the multitude of new posters which will i hope soon be arriving !! regards to you and your incredible team .
If you are open to suggestions. I ask you please read my post. @caleber24p I am sorry if I am spamming your post and will remove if requested, this is just a direction I very much want to start to see. I am not asking for your vote, but to read the idea and the reasons behind them. Thanks
https://steemit.com/steemit/@clevecross/if-it-were-mine-to-change-my-answer-to-stellabella-and-why
Has the change worked out? Should we not go back to the old way??
It was 50/50 and then they changed it to 75/25, partly because they felt whale curators were earning the lions share of the pot. Here is the article explaining why they were changing things:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/overhaul-of-curation-rewards
It is possible that there is a sweet spot between 50/50 and 75/25 - but it would take a lot of iterations to find it.
Great point and thank you for the link.
I think whales making lots of money is not a problem. The issue is that the curation system does not do what it's supposed to do.
So looking at who gets how much is asking the wrong question.
Part of the reason it probably doesn't do what it is supposed to do is low participation on the lower end of the SP wealth spectrum. By cutting the pool in half it doubled the amount of SP someone has to have to earn any curation rewards at all. This excludes many people on the lower end from participating and for those that barely do make the cut, the rewards are still very small (specifically half of what they would be otherwise).
It is true that people with low SP don't vote as much.
However the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. And the main reason why curation does not work is because it is not profitable to vote for what you like, but what others vote for exactly 30 minutes after a post was created.
This is best done by a bot. But we want people to vote for what they like and people get rewarded if they create content others love.
So the overall algo needs to be reviewed with this goal and the data from past experience in mind.
My feeling from what I read is that we are a little bit not accepting reality here and trying to come up with excuses.
It does not matter if fewer people vote if they still vote according to the right objective.
@smooth Thank you for the dialog and thank you for your work and input. Have you read my proposal to make steem better via bounties?
@knircky I do not believe I read your post about bounties. I mean no disrespect by not reading a post but frankly my time is limited and I can't read every post, explore every idea, etc. I wish I could.
@smooth I understand. Please do. I really think it is worth your time. it as a short summary, maybe u can check that out. I wrote the summary exactly for people like you who don't have time reading the whole thing.
Some points from my post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@knircky/the-potential-of-bounties-an-improvement-proposal-for-steem-to-double-its-value
I would really like to hear what you think.
What about 40 % to author, 40 % to curators and 20% to the top 10 comments (based on votes, of course) ?
In this way commenting will be the next game, not posting.
And, IMHO, commenting =activity.
Activity=steemit will thrive.
Commenting seems to be lumped in with author/content creation right now.
I think this is a good idea. Although I post here now and then and they do good, I still think curators are rewarded too little. It has totally taken away the incentive for me to want to curate properly noticing a small reward in return for my efforts compared to my SP level.
I am glad the community are taking the steps and asking or suggesting changes, shows that its headed in the right direction over time, considering Steemit listens to its users!