RE: Thinking Out The Box: Curation Rewards
I feel that is the complete opposite of a solution. Self voting is already the most profitable use of investment in the platform and that is what I feel is the core problem we are up against. I am of the mindset that we need to make curation the profitable reason to invest in the platform and there is no way to get rid of self voting. Make a second account and still vote for your own comments etc would be the response. We need business minded people making logical investment sense of why it pays to invest in and use the platform. New users are not really given incentive to care about long term growth in the platform right now because curating has been the backseat issue for over a year. Curation rewards are a joke. I regularly curate posts that get hit by Curie upvotes later and they may make .02-.04 SP. Think about that in a larger scale investment perspective. What is the point of having a million dollars invested in STEEM to give someone 75% of my stake reward and take 25% of it for myself. It's like saying not only do you have to invest in STEEM, but you have to give away most of your investment. The other solution is you can just vote for yourself and get 100% of the reward. I really think making curation profitable and competitive is the solution to getting both investment and actual active users on the platform.
I think you make good points but ultimately I disagree. Self voting is an issue which cannot be gotten around that is true. If you banned it people would find a way to vote for themselves probably by the sock puppet/alt account route as you say.
But i don't think we are going to see users flock to steemit because they can earn by curating. Originally when I joined it was 50/50 rewards which should have meant way more curation to individuals but it was virtually nothing. It was pushed quite hard at the time as this being a killer feature. But what became of it, nada.
Partly because what you say is true, curation rewards are crap. I just think sometimes you have to go full on mad turkey out of the box and if something is broken not just try and tweak what is there. Hence my, get it gone approach. :0)
I think we need to make it even more profitable for authors. That is my solution :0)
I'm all for active discussion and looking for new solutions. I often have a lot of those "just throw it the fuck out and try something different" ideas from time to time. I'm not opposed to what you suggest from an author standpoint, but I still feel like the issue is it offers no incentive for people to vote for each other. Say we reversed your idea and did zero reward to authors, would you still bother creating content, or would you just go around voting on others? I think balance is imperative, but asking either side to give seems to be a relentless bickering argument. I still think if we do simple math and consider that most of the content creators aren't the ones investing and holding 250,000-millions of STEEM, it's only logical that at least half of that vote payout should be going to the person taking the financial risk. I say this as both a content creator and a curator, I fully recognize that I don't hold all of that risk by having that much STEEM and feel it's fair to earn profit on an investment. On a personal level, I love the idea of a gift economy and charity, but expecting business people to shoot themselves in the foot to give other people money is illogical.
See, the whole, it offers no incentive for people to vote is the bit I mean particularly. There are loads of other social media or even just big sites in which people vote/like/comment/review all for the princely sum of nothing. Not a bean. They do it for nothing. I think that is what would happen here too.
The curation model doesn't work for that vast majority of the users of the platform.
Why should it be kept or levered even further in the direction of the big fish?
Often people will invest in crypto for the sake of the currency speculation itself. Heck some of them might be philanthropical about it and just love to vote up undiscovered content :0)
And as for posting if I didn't get paid for it. I probably would, I love writing. I stuck with it back in the days of hardfork 18 where most posts made single figure cents.
I don't know if we will see big investors come to steemit for the curation rewards. I don't even think that we need them. Eventually if successful they will come and invest because they have to. Or a horde of smaller investors who create content will invest. Ultimately there can be a demand for steem without giant investors coming in. I don't even think there are that many here just now. There are certainly people with huge amounts of so but a lot of the ones that bought it left when steem sunk to sub twenty cents.
I agree with most of this. I think it's just interesting seeing the issues that come from monetizing a social platform like this. It's like adding money into the mix adds different motives and objectives for many different people. I'm right there with you about writing through the very unprofitable times, hell I remember writing when STEEM was .09 cents and I'm sure you do too. I feel like either solution could work ultimately, but for this to be a cryptocurrency and not just another social media platform, we have to figure out the logistics of where the tokens come from and what the point is, because right now even if the platform succeeds, we have to fix the financial side of things too. I don't have all of the answers and I appreciate your perspective on this as well. Good food for thought.
I very much appreciate your perspective. I like to chew the fat over this shit as they say in Ireland.
It is a difficult issue. There is probably a solution there somewhere or at least something to try. Perhaps not even keep them or lose them but something else. I hope that they dont just tinker with what we have and do something else instead. Something left field even :O)
I agree the financial side of things needs to be fixed. What if the reward mechanism is abandoned completely; for voters and for posts? If this results in the end of blogging type of services, so what? Steem is a crypto currency and does not require a difficult reward allocation designed for Steemit and Busy like blogging anf UIs. Since we let everybody develop into the Steem blockchain and everybody can use the reward mechanism, the reward side of things is by default an issue. Zappl posts are regarded by some as always to be sh*t posts because het contains only a couple of words + optional image + optional URL. Others love them. I posted earlier about the fact Zappl should not been integrated with Steem blockchain in the way it did; ie sharing the reward mechanism with Steemit, and SteepShot. By nature these are total different services and should have had their own blockchain + reward mechanism.But that said, we will have to face so many issues due to the reward mechanism, my proposal is to discuss the fact to remove the reward mechanisms to authors and curators altogether.
And yeh, I started with Steemit when Steem was a few cents, and dropped to something like 5ct, I never stopped reading, posting; Curating. But so many others did, because the rewards were not good; And then they returned when Steem got back some of its initial value. Money s*ckers, including those who quit and came back with big wallets and lots of SP and lots of Reputation. We can do without them!
I'd upvote both of you even without any curation reward!!
Hehe, splendid!!
To be honest, self-voting is overblown an issue. It’s the easiest to get rid off.
Creating a second account isn’t that easy as it sounds like. The second account still needs SP. oh hey, I have an account I now use for curation, i.e. to write about great reads and all SP it makes I delegate to my main. So I can reward those I upvote better.
Outlaw self-voting (with code) and if people want to create and use alt accounts for it, it means more SP in circulation. Unless, of course, they will dilute themselves.
It is easy for those with masses of SP though. They just farm out a big portion of it. For them the issue is getting the votes back and if self voting were not allowed then they would probably farm their sp out somewhere else or even worse just start voting someone that wasnt them but actually was
Agreed with that. There’s some things we will never be able to fully eradicate (should we), even less so in a world of a blockchain since one can easily interact directly with the blockchain.
But if defined by Governance as not welcome, the whole ethics around it would change.
I admit I have not looked yet in to how often do (big) whales statistically write. I’m not convinced that an investor would come here and focus on curation to make their money back. That just seems like a waste of time, and an absolutely poor ROI, to me.
Delegation is most definitely a much sweeter business model. Spreading the wealth and delegating to new, positive projects on Steem even more so. Because, eventually, the depth of the Steem ecosystem will define whether Steem goes up or flatlines. Not just the blogging which is right now the most prevalent activity. I think that’s way too shortsighted a focus. Content isn’t worth THAT much.
Just ask Ev Williams (blogger/blogspot, twitter, and medium founder).
I completely agree. For an investor there are ways to maximise their return which do not involve interaction with steemit themselves. Steem is a currency. There can be other ways which should be looked at. There are a few curators out there who do incredibly well. But it is not the norm and involves a lot of work I think
Looking at a more traditional form of curation, a pre-likes/RTs/Digg/Reddit/Web2.0 form of curation, it is a full-time job.
Most high profile creators like Jason Kottke, John Gruber, the Boing Boing crew, Drudge Report started with curation on the side until popular.
Many of those still run multiple projects, or jobs as such, actually despite publicly known revenue for their sites being generally awesome.
Given that on Steem it is more difficult even, although more and more have their own submission process but that also comes with lots of noise, it surely is a lot of work.
I am a curator in that older spirit/sense btw. Apologies for the shameless plug.
I don't mind a shameless plug, it's obvious from reading your comments that you are not a link drop and away kind of person :0)