I've been thinking about curation rewards and how they can be improved.

Image credit: Mine (It sucks but it's all mine)

Authors should have the option to change the author/curation reward distribution.

Right now the author/curation reward for a post is hard coded to 75% for authors and 25% for curators. I'm proposing that the author be given the option to change that distribution in 25% increments up to 100% curation reward for a post. As the curation reward increases, the corresponding author reward goes down. So if an author chooses to give 75% to the curators the author still gets 25%. A 100% curation reward would mean the author get 0%.

Why?

Why would an author want to give up 100% of the author reward to curators? One reason would be if the post is an advertisement for a service the author is promoting. I know a lot of posts about new steem related services are effectively crowd funding efforts, but sometimes the service charges a fee. The post then becomes a revenue generating advertisement about a revenue generating service.

By letting the author give 100% of the reward to curators, the author is encouraging people to upvote their post. This could help move posts higher on the trending lists and increase the exposure of the service offered.

More Witness Updates

Some Steemit Witnesses post regular updates of tasks they have performed or projects they are working on. This is great information and is useful in selecting which witness candidates to vote for. Allowing witness candidates to solicit votes and give away 100% of the posts rewards to curators would, I think, be appropriate. After all, if you are one of the top 19 witnesses you are already being rewarded with over $65,000 a year in Steem Power even at todays depressed Steem prices.

This would allow Witnesses to keep us updated on a more regular basis without seeming to be looking for an additional handout. The better informed we are about the performance of our Witnesses, the better choices we can make when voting for Witnesses.

Did I plagiarize your idea?

I have not seen this idea put forth before now. If you posted about this change in the reward mechanism previously, I sincerely apologize for claiming your idea for my own.

What do you think?

I hope you like this idea and will solicit for it's inclusion in the Steemit platform. I don't think it will be too difficult to implement. The reward split is already in the code, they just need to make it a choice of 4 values instead of hard coded to one value.

Please leave your thoughts on my idea and throw an upvote and a follow my way if you like this proposal.