Steemit long term survival

As Steemit authors continue to write more articles, and Steemit attracts more users, it's important to consider what role old content will play on the platform.

People who have been following my content for any length of time will know that I think the current Steemit experience is less than ideal for content discovery, especially old content.

There have been multiple initiatives to improve the Steemit UI, and while applications such as Steem Tag Search make it easier to find older content they are still limited by the user knowing what they want to read. Ideally, algorithms should be able to accurately predict what people would like to read factoring out post-time entirely.

But it's not just the Steemit UI, which anyone could reimplement, that discourages evergreen content, the blockchain payout schedule does that too.

Currently, rewards are paid out 7 days after the article has been posted, and while this is an improvement from when I first joined Steemit where the payout was just 24 hours after creation, this schedule still encourages time sensitive content over timeless content.

Now, you may quite reasonably ask what's wrong with content that is irrelevant after a couple of weeks. The answer is there's really nothing inherently wrong with time sensitive content, and many news sites are quite successful with this model.

However, it doesn't fully utilize the benefit of the blockchain backing steemit.com. If you're using Steemit, you're probably at least somewhat familar with blockchain technology, but in case you aren't a blockchain can be thought of as a very inefficient add-only database.

This means once something has been written to the blockchain (like this article), it can never be erased as long as there are computers with a copy of the blockchain.

Now, if everyone exclusively writes time-sensitive content the percentage of irrelevant, or dead, information on the blockchain quickly increase as time goes on. This means that any nodes running the blockchain will have to store ever more useless information (useless in the sense that it doesn't have any relevance anymore). This will clog up people's harddrives, and discourage people from running full-nodes.

Now, to an extend, this will be off-set by cheaper storage, and increased capacity.

However, the affects run farther than just to the maintainers of the blockchain as search engines such as Google tend to prefer content that is timeless. This could negatively impact the potential for Steemit to become a mainstream blogging site, and makes it harder to attract media companies to write on the platform.

Furtermore, the payout schedule discourages long form content that takes a long time to research and write as the long term benefits that usually comes with that diminishes due to the payout schedule.

This leads to people prioritizing shorter, but more frequent articles see for example @jerrybanfield's article "Testing 3 to 8 Shorter Steemit Posts Daily with eSteem!", and steemit user @papa-pepper who posts 3 to 5 time every day. Note: This is not to say there's anything wrong with the way these steemit users use the platform, but serves to illustrate how the UI, and blockchain rules effect people's behaviour when people optimize the system.

So what can we do about it? Besides continuing to optimize the user experience, I propose a new payout schedule which could be something like: Initial payout after 7 days, and then subsequent payout every 30 days after the initial payout continuing indefinitely.

Another method could be where all posts build up credit which is paid out at a specific, recurring time; for example, the end of the week, or month mimicking traditional paychecks.

Regardless, of the specific implementation, changing the payout schedule to encourage upvoting old content will help making long-form, evergreen, content more viable.