Advocating for Long Term Steemit Payouts
Payouts for Steemit posts should not be limited to 7 days or even a month. They should last forever, just like the rights to music, art, or unique material hosted on pay-sites. Some content retains value over long periods of time. Viewers should be able to upvote content, regardless of its age, for the benefit of the author!
Posting Flash, then Gone!
Steemit is a great platform but has placed an inordinate amount of focus on short term posts. Here today and gone tomorrow. Rewards are aligned to this immediate gratification system. But we are missing a huge opportunity for the platform, namely hosting long-term valuable content.
I believe Steemit is the perfect place to reward authors for content which has lasting value for viewers.
Content with Lasting Value
Here are some examples:
- Wikipedia style knowledge site (posts for individual topics)
- Authoring a Book (one chapter at a time)
- Music (listen or link to a download)
- Art/Photography
- Videos
- How-to Tutorials
- Journals
- Petitions
- Yearbook entries
Take for example, if an author wanted to write a novel on Steemit! They could post individual chapters in separate posts. Each, part of the collective, would tell the story. A visitor who was interested could go to the first post (chapter #1) and begin the novel. If the fan like the work, they would upvote it. This reward should go to the author, regardless if the post is 1 day or 1 year old. The new fan could move to the second chapter and so on, upvoting and commenting along the way, with the author benefitting from their work. Readers may also be socializing the merits of the chapters, as they read them, across other social sites, thereby adding to the exposure of the platform. This is the way it should be.
A Better Steemit
It stands to reason, if the reward system supported long-term value propositions, content creators would use the system for their benefit, thus contributing to the overall quality of what can be found on Steemit.com
My ask to the Steemit developers, is to consider instituting a system which pay’s upvotes to authors and curators in perpetuity. Just as if the content was a song, painting, TV show, or movie. Give the creators payouts whenever they are earned and not just for the first day, week, or month.
While I love the idea of being paid out in perpetuity, I'm not certain it's realistic (and I have a bunch of evergreen posts). I'm resigned to the fact that my growing SP is the residual income for those old posts.
Rarely does anyone visit those old posts unless I happen to cite them in my current posts, but if I really wanted to, I could take my old evergreens and post them on my website which is currently gathering dust since I've joined Steemit.
I've also got chapters of my fiction writing as well. Nothing's stopping me from self-publishing elsewhere to potentially earn more from the work and including links to them in my signature line.
So yes, a perpetual payout would be great but I'd really like to see the reward pool focused on new content and their creators.
But as a platform, we would want you (author of awesome timeless content) to stay on Steemit and not post them elsewhere to earn money. Instead, keep earning the money here and direct users to our platform. They will read your material, but may also stick around and read others. Maybe become a permanent member. That is how we build a bigger and more active community.
Steemit was designed to reward authors and curators. Why have a time limit on those rewards? The system should be able to handle the back-end calculations. The blockchain records all the activity. This is what Steemit was designed to do!
I agree with everything you say here but I honestly don't think the current UI would support this idea until the authors/creators had a way to select their evergreen posts to highlight on a true profile page.
We can't even organize or categorize our posts at the moment. All we can do is scroll to find old posts because the search option is pretty terrible. But some people are uber organized and have spreadsheets of their posts and links to be sorted (off platform, obviously).
IF Steemit gave me a profile page with, let's say, my TOP 10 blog post choices, then I would probably push to have THOSE 10 POSTS re-opened for revenue. IMHO, until that happens people will bounce and old posts will fall under "Out of sight, Out of mind"
Hmm... your response made me think that it would actually be pretty cool if we could select a limited # of our blog posts to stay evergreen. Kind of like the witness list, we'd have to manually take the blog post off ever green once we reached max and wanted to add a different post to the list. That might balance out, no? Say, 10 evergreen posts. (I don't know if I'm using that term correctly here, but in digital ad operations it means always live)
Exactly @prufarchy!
I think it would be a great compromise to allow each Steemian to choose up to 10 posts that could earn beyond the 30 day window with the ability to manually rotate the ones we want to highlight.
But again, the current interface doesn't allow us a proper profile/landing page to showcase our achievements. Once we get it, with a way to message users publicly or privately, I truly believe we'll see more mainstream users coming aboard.
That pretty page with options and achievements is vital IMHO.
I agree.
I'm posting my SECOND novel in daily episodes...(about a thousand words each, on average)
I'd very much like to be paid beyond the first hour after posting....in perpetuity sounds good.
Why shouldn't you be paid for new readers who appreciate your earlier posts and upvote them? Why can't discussions about those posts, which generate further interest, also be rewarded?
I think authors should be able to repost old content for the eyes of new readers. Obviously there are limits to peoples tolerance of that, but if a series was good 12 months ago and the platform population has increased 200%, then you have a whole lot of eyes that have never appreciated the content.
Some community consensus could be reached about what is appropriate in reviving old posts. There could even be arrangements to limit the rewards of old posts to a lower value than new original content.
Hell! People could be doing it now, and I wouldn't know. I've not seen every post ever made on Steemit. If I find something I've read before, I wouldn't upvote it. Pretty simple I think.
Why force 'reposting'? The beauty of blockchains is the permanence of data. Steemit should simply keep them active, including the payout benefits.
I don't have much perspective as I just joined a couple days ago, but this short window of value was one of my first big concerns about how Steem could scale as a more broadly accepted funding platform for content. As we all know, it takes a long time for creators to build an audience, and a lot of future revenue they receive will be from new users going back and reading through old content pieces (or when the pieces suddenly become very prescient due to events). To me, it seems very difficult to see how the 7 day model could earn creators anything close to what they would be making now on ad-driven platforms. (I am mainly thinking about Youtubers and bloggers...)
I agree. I dont see why this is a limiting factor. For most cases there might not be a need but for others such as books or content that would typically earn royalties in the real world :) why not have an option to be paid in perpetuity? It could even be optional and not just a one size fits all payout schedule.
Are you thinking of a weekly payout? So every 7 days every post created (within a rolling 7 day window) will have to be evaluated for a payout? That seems like something which couldn't possibly scale over time. The number of posts which would have to be evaluated for payout would be growing exponentially.
What about a 30 day rolling period. It would not need to occur for every post, just ones with upvote activity (flag) since the last period. That should scale.
that would be cool.. but if someone likes it after u get paid then it will say 'potential payout' again and you WILL get that money.. wont u?
Right now, after 30 days I believe you get nothing. There is a dev proposal to shorten that down to 7 days. Then poof! No more payouts on that blog.
I would think that this proposal is a good idea. My guess is that the inhibiting factor is that content gets buried deep in the blockchain as time goes by making it increasingly difficult to keep it fresh and alive.
In science, it is important to deprecate old theories as evidence supports new theories. We need to be able to recognize the old work and re-evaluate it in the light of modern thinking even if the old theory is decades old.
Agreed. The next step, and it could even be done by 3rd parties, is to catalog and present such material in a stimulating and consumable fashion. It could be done in Steemit, with a more comprehensive user-profile page (been asking for that one for a while, but I get it is low priority), but also independently through other services and sites.
For example, @everittdmickey writes a series of posts which collectively represent a novel. On his personal webpage he might have a full page dedicated to his book. Cover art, notes, and the links to Steemit for the individual chapters! Users could then pull the chapters, read and upvote. @everittdmickey gets rewarded in Steem and the platform has a valuable 3rd party link to bring in more viewers!
A suggestion made elsewhere, that I REALLY liked,
was that you choose which posts you want to continue receiving votes/payout on,
and then each month a certain amount of Steem is deducted for keeping that post in the active list.
... similar to promoting a post.
It could be about the equivalent of 1 cent, depending on the average value of Steem that month.
Steemit can not keep all the posts active.
Ok...I'm going to save this url and contact you @canadian-coconut. Perhaps you'll get a reply notice idk. Please respond if you do?
I've upvoted and I know that on current blogs my upvote is worth but 2 cents. The vote registered to you but, as discussed here nothing is here. I'm wondering if my account was charged for the upvote...and if so where did it go?
The issue of this blog from @mrosenquist is not my main concern although it is why I searched about long term payout for content. What concerns me atm is uninformed/unaware steemers wandering into a blog like this and upvoting without realizing that their vote may have cost them (not established yet) but wasn't sent to the intended recipient.
I hope you get my meaning here. If I don't hear from you I'll DM you in Discord PAL
~may all hatred cease...let there be peace~
Seems like a lot of effort for authors, when the system can just do it automatically for all posts. This is blockchain tech after all!
You wouldn't have to reset it each month. It wouldn't take long to set up.
Please allow me to thank you for this blog. As old as it is it was of some use to me in my due diligence in finding out just what I can do for @steemit ...and what it can/might do for me. Please see my reply below to @canadian-coconut. I've followed you...perhaps if you have any updated information about this issue you could send me a link?
Best of luck to you...peace out...in
You can repost old posts :)
I agree that Steemit as an interface has a visibility issue. Better said, posts have this issue.
Yes, third party sites with different display of blockchain data (posts), advanced search and filtering, subscriptions, ... can be some sort of solution.
But, even on third party site you are still bound by the same rules about rewarding the post (time frame, steem power, voting power, rewards pool.
Rules can change in future, though. They did several times until now.
I would prefer if they changed the structure now, so re-posting would not be necessary. It will just be a matter of time before someone creates a tool/service to repost old blogs. That would bloat the blockchain, interface, feeds, etc. Just keep the payouts permanently active.