How-to Simplify Utopian Moderator Payments

Within Utopian, many moderators work really hard to assess Utopian contributions to be rejected or approved for a (strong) upvote from @Utopian-io (Bleep! Bleep!). Sometimes that leads to internal discussions amongst moderators and their supervisors, and in many instances it also leads to discussions between moderators and authors that disagree with a certain decision (or simply want more information to learn from).

Be this as it may, what's clear beyond doubt, is that Utopian moderation requires really a lot of work, and is also very necessary to assure Utopian contributions are of sufficient quality levels. It's therefore also crystal clear that Utopian moderators deserve fair moderation rewards for their work. (Disclaimer: I'm a Utopian moderator myself and I can honestly say I do the best I can!)

The current Utopian Moderator Payment System explained

Utopian uses the concept of "moderator reward shares" to calculate the payment amount every Utopian moderator deserves based on the total amount of work every moderator has proportionally done compared to all moderator work done from the beginning of Utopian-IO until that moment.

For example, look at my own current Utopian Moderation work:

Currently, my own "Moderator Reward Shares" metric displays 1.76%. This means, that - let's say - if in total 5,000 Utopian contributions were moderated by all moderators in total, that I did 88 of them myself: (88 / 5,000) * 100% = 1.76%. The other 98.24% of Utopian moderations were done by all the other Utopian moderators. You can have look to all moderator reward shares statistics at https://utopian.io/moderators (after logging in first using your Steem credentials via SteemConnect).

My current "Rewards Received" show me $0.00: that's right people, I haven't received anything yet for my moderation work (that's ok for me, but some moderators sharing the same faith might feel different about it).

The reason why Utopian-IO still hasn't paid many moderators their earned moderator rewards, is because of the current technical system, which is based on the Benefactor system: it's really difficult to explain exactly how it works, but what's clear - I hope - to anybody is that the current Moderator Payment System is complex, slow (and maybe even a bit buggy).

How-to Simplify Utopian Moderator Payments, and speed them up really fast as well?

I hereby suggest a change of the technical Moderator Reward system used, as follows:

• remove the current 5% moderator reward shares from the current Benefactor-system;
• instead, start upvoting 1 random moderator rejection / approval comment for each moderator by Utopian-IO;
• there's a discussion going on right now to upgrade the Moderator Rewards percentage from 5% to 10% or even 15%, but for now - for simplicity matters in this explanation / proposal - let's assume it gets upgraded to 10% (I will show why that's very easy to technically implement below!;
• I argue that Utopian-IO every day needs to vote exactly 20% of its Voting Weight, no more and no less, starting at exactly 100%;
• to do so, it first needs to sum / cumulate all ABSOLUTE approved contributions weights of the currently un-voted-upon contributions approved in the last 24 hours, and then use a simple calculation to calculate at which RELATIVE WEIGHT Utopian-IO needs to vote each post;
• amongst those daily votes, should be 1 approval / rejection comment, from and for every Utopian moderator that was actively moderating the last 24 hours;
• the first upvote round by Utopian-IO (in total deducting 2% voting power, when starting at exactly 100%, which is exactly 10% moderator rewards), should be for the Moderator Rewards;
• every Moderator Comment Upvote from Utopian-IO is equal to the current Moderator Reward Share percentage (in my own case: 1.76%, which I explained above);
• this way every moderator gets a small daily payment for their hard work done moderating (which also causes them to not be able to contribute themselves that often because of their moderation work);
• and it also incentivizes moderators to at least moderate one contribution daily, even at their holidays and weekends, which in turn will positively affect the average moderation approval time.

EDIT: to be fully correct at this suggestion / moderator rewards proposal, I wanted to add the remark that the way I described it above, the moderator rewards would actually be 7.5% (because of the 75% author rewards on the comment upvotes by Utopian-IO). However, since Utopian-IO knows exactly at which moderator comment it upvoted, it could also use a continuous powerdown to give back the 25% curation reawrds on said comment upvotes, or utilize a small SBD liquidity reserve pool to auto pay with.

@scipio

PS: I also suggested a Utopian Think Tank Candidate System Proposal yesterday.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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