Data must be meaningful, which is to say, contextualized. I think that the post value representation on steemit.com is pretty wrong and this post just shows another reason for it. @robrigo and I have both raised the issue before (hope you don't mind being mentioned) and I'm glad for your perspective on this too.
The dollar value on a post before payout is problematic. It can seriously mislead, as you have pointed out here, with negative psychological effects that can disable a user. Beside the personal effect, it is actually based on incorrect contextualization in my opinion. Because of incomplete knowledge of the workings of the system, or pain disagreement with down votes, seeing the value go down feels like being stolen from. And it is stealing, but only from the potential reward. The further confounding factor of changes to the reward pool from voting which is completely independent of the post does not help either.
Here's a different suggestion. Have you seen the Mashable velocity graph? It describes how articles are trending on social media. Here's an example:
and up close
This one has a shape that's not a million miles from Karen's. It gives an idea of what is happening to the value, but does not tantalize and perhaps mislead the author with a dollar amount. It just shows what we are interested in, what is the vote volume over time? Vote volume here means total votes weighted as normal (i.e. by voting power and voters SP).
I would suggest that the chart should not corrected for daily reward pool, etc., and shows what is important here, cumulative votes over time, as this is just a fact at payout time. Only at payout should the dollar amount be shown.
Also note that it just shows the trend, as there are no axis or numbers. This is important to avoid loss aversion.
Also also note that the coloring is left to right, implying something important about the time. This also directly applies to payout on Steemit, we could "arrive" at a nice color of blue perhaps at payout time.
With HardFork17 extending and unifying the payout period to 7 days this might be more important than ever.
There is another issue with showing dollar amounts on posts. I came to steemit about 5 months ago and its really demoralising when you first start and you see older posts with thousands of dollars then after putting your heart and soul into writing a masterpiece you only gets a few cents.
That must be awful for morale! I heard they were easily in the thousands at that time? 😭
But are you suggesting rewards should be only be shown in STEEM? That might be interesting. However I recognize that the dollar amount is kind of the carrot on the end of the stick for new people. They look at it, especially the trending page, and say "Wow! These posts are earning $100!" or some such. That would be a lot less relatable, especially for non-crypto types (exactly who we want to attract I assume) if it were 800 STEEM or similar. You buy coffee with dollars, Big Macs, fill up your car with gas, buy the car. What can you do with STEEM?
It's going to be a compromise. It sure is a compromise now, but I think it can be improved. Removing the value completely seems too extreme, as some have suggested. I think the main thing to combat is misrepresenting the data before payout, as I've outlined. However this too would mean no dollar signs on the trending page.
So perhaps the landing page for signed out users should be "top posts this week" which are after payout. It would be simple to do and would put the focus on the payout instead of the race to see the dollars move up, and the sinking feeling when they go down. Again, maybe they want it this way, maybe it's part of what they hope makes Steemit addicting and moresome.
I think that the dollar amounts are a great selling point for the platform but the graphs you showed in your comment got me thinking that some other metric besides money would also be useful to show next to it.
At the moment we have votes and views but they don't mean much to new users. One post gets 10 votes and earns 10 dollars, another post gets 200 votes and earns 1 dollar. One post has 100 votes but just 10 views. ???? I know why this is happening but for new users this is very confusing
The point is there doesn't seem to be any consistency in the simple metrics that are at our disposal and the payout that a post gets. This is another manifestation of what @demotruk is talking about, in my opinion, in that presented to the user is a dollar amount that varies during the payout period. The key metric that is presented and what is only natural to be drawn to is how much your going to get.
A better metric or graphical representation that does not change over time or change significantly which could be used by all users to help them compare how their work is being received and also to reduce the loss aversion issue described by @demotruk.
Some might say that comments and engagement would represent this and what I am asking for is already there but there is little doubt that the dollar amount is what many are drawn to and is quite striking.
What may be a solution to compare how work is being received is two dollar values on old posts, what was paid on the post originally and what that post would get today.
Succinctly put. This is key.
For new users a little mini graph beside it would give them the information, without the need for explanation as it can be inferred, that the value can be expected to go up, but also down, and that it's a process which as of HF17 will last a week.
Keep pushing it, the Steemit.com guys require a good bit of discussion in posts before they consider ideas.