RE: An Open Letter to Steemit Gods, Dan in Particular Are You Trying to Build the Buzzfeed of the Blockchain?
We have to acknowledge that there are limitations to the voting payout model. Without setting finite bounds, voting on all historic proposals indefinitely introduces complexity that grows as a hyperbola. It approaches infinity quickly and is not sustainable.
The white paper correctly identifies problems with traditional models of reward as well as experimental models such as tipping. All these models have some limitation, so why not apply them where they are appropriate when another model is not? This is a problem that needs to be solved, and voting is not the only tool at our disposal.
It would be quite easy for Steemit to introduce tipping for posts that have gone beyond the payout period but where users still wish to reward the creator. It's possible now, just awkward.
Similarly, loathe as I am to suggest it, the SteemIt website itself could place ads on the pages of older posts from users who opt in. The revenue could be shared between the creator and the site. The user thus pays with their attention.
I'm not at all in favor of ads, because ads quickly become competing content and make the newsfeed unbearable. There is a vast gulf, however, between an arbitrary 30 days and infinity. Also, a mechanism whereby any post that never earned a payout, or even earned a certain number of upvotes is dead in 90 days. No reason to keep everything for ever, but those posts that the community got behind shouldn't end their usefulness as revenue earners. They stay here forever,which would be great, if they could make a little, but as it stands, I can't go and sell something that is already here very well, consequently, I'll be creating disposable content for the most part, until this changes.
It would also be really easy to implement Steem-Patreon, without the huge fees of that platform.