RE: Whale’s dilemma
These are sensible points @dantheman but I would think about that carefully though before making such a drastic change.
I'm not sure what the rate of voting is vs the rate of posting. I suspect removing curation rewards completely might cause a significant reduction in the number of people voting.
There is already a perception that many people just "post" and leave.
Again I don't have the data with regards to that but it makes sense that when people are taking a lot of time and effort making a post they will have limited time to curate content.
There needs to be some kind of encouragement for curation.
One possible alternative I have considered is that curation grants a "posting reward". What I mean by this is that everyone must curate a certain number of posts before they can post their own.
Obviously this could have it's own potential problems in that people could just start randomly voting on content to simply get to necessary amount of curation in order to post. It would also penalise people who are more picky and selective in their voting. Perhaps you can think of a way to make this more viable.
Anyway it might be useful if you did a separate full post on the curation issue.
That way the community might also be able to help in coming up with a workable solution. The more people looking at the problem the greater the likelihood it can be successfully be solved.
Maybe adding more stats to curation rewards and having how well you have done curating affect your reputation score?
I think this is cause authors get ~70% of the rewards while commenters and curators are left with less, if we could maybe go down to 50% for author, 30% curation and 20% comments, it would give people more incentive to comment on posts they can relate to.
Currently I don't see how commenters have incentive to comment with more quality content on related posts except for hoping many happen to read it and vote on it. In the cases of not even the author replying or giving a vote to commenters who took a lot of time to contribute, its really sad to see happening.
Edit: I just wanted to add to what I quoted, that I spend a lot of time here and I see a lot of authors, doing their 4 hit posts a day, going afk with 99% voting power and a couple people followed while having many followers. Leaves a certain un-personal trace after their articles and makes it look like its just a magazine you are reading now with random titles and content.
Edit 2: we really need an edit indication with a timestamp at least, would make edits a lot less confusing.
I agree and I'm more likely to upvote authors who I see active in comments and voting. If I don't see that, I consider the posts to be more "hit and run" or worse press releases and do not constitute quality engagement for the platform and in some cases I might even downvote it.
I don't think we need special incentives for comments as that will attract spam, but we do need to pay attention to who is adding value and who is doing hit-and-run. I do agree that the low value of curation rewards is part of the problem both for engagement and the value of STEEM (I objected to cutting them from 50% to 0-25% and I object to cutting them to 0% as Dan mentioned is being considered).
Isn't the possibility to allocate funds itself already a big enough incentive to vote? Currently with many big accounts not using their voting power, effectively you get nearly twice your money to distribute to good content of your choice. What do you want more?
Currently many people are just voting to get the curation reward, not because they necessarily like to support the post. Also the curation reward algorithm is so complex, that not many will understand it.
We could give the saved money from the curation reward to fully verified accounts. This would help greatly to encourage newcomers to participate at steemit. More on how this could look like please see my other comment below.
Up Vote for the curation rewards lol but good point, being able to vote on the allocation of generated funds is definitely also an incentive in itself.
" reward to fully verified accounts"
We need to be making crypto-currency (and anything dealing with it, such as this platform) more private/anonymous, not less.
verifying accounts does not mean, that all accounts need to be verified. it just means, that you get an universal income if you have a verified account. nothing should stop you to create 100+ unverified accounts.