Let's Remove The 7 Day Payout Window
Let me just preface all of this with the fact that I’m still new here, and maybe there’s some specific reason for the 7 day payout limit that I don’t know about. Maybe it’s even a limitation of the technology that would make it really difficult. Please let me know in the comments if there are specific reasons, or just let me know your opinion. And now for a bit of a rant. 🙂
Also, I misspoke a couple times in this video and that’s why there are subtitles overlaid on my face a couple times. I was a little too tired when I recorded it. 😆
What is the point of the 7 day payout limit? I keep searching around for a convincing argument for why this exists, but I can’t find it. It feels weird that we’re all building this big permanent, immutable blockchain full of content, but its permanence isn’t reflected in the payout system.
If one of the goals of this blockchain is to reward content creators for what they make, then the 7 day payout limit doesn’t fully reflect that value, just a snapshot of it. If we’re to truly reward content, then it should be rewarded for as long as its on the blockchain and bringing people value, which hopefully will be for many years. We should all be allowed to decide where to direct our voting power, regardless of the age of a post.
The more I try to learn about cryptocurrency, and the Steem blockchain in particular, the more I stumble on old Steemit posts answering my questions. But they’re months or years old at this point, so I have no way of rewarding the author. Let’s fix this problem!
The best reason that I’ve heard for the 7 day payout window is to help eliminate reward pool abuse. But hopefully this is a temporary problem and one that we can learn to either self-regulate or wait for a fix to the blockchain itself.
An Example With YouTube
To give a sense of how much people can earn from old posts, I’m going to take a look at YouTube, where people can earn money by showing ads on their videos. As a first example, lets take a look at one of the most popular YouTubers right now: Casey Neistat. He has over 9 million subscribers, 2 billion views, and has uploaded 876 videos. The most important stat that I want to look at are his views per day, which you can see if you scroll down on his Social Blade page.
He’s hovering at around 600,000 views per day, on days when he doesn’t even upload a video. There is a big spike whenever he does upload something, but when you consider that his recent videos are getting about 1.5 million views, and that he’s consistently getting over 500,000 views per day even if he hasn’t uploaded anything in awhile, you can see how much his huge catalog of old videos affects his income.
I also want to take a look at Louis Thomas’s channel (@louisthomas) for some info about a channel that’s isn’t as big. I hope he doesn’t mind me talking about him here. 😀
Louis has about 94,000 subscribers, over 5 million views, and has uploaded 305 videos. He had a small lull of posting videos between March 7th and 12th, but you can see the slowest day still had 4,500 views and the most views he’s had in the past two weeks is around 20,000. So even on days where he doesn’t post a new video, he’s still getting a nice consistent stream of income.
How Can We Fix This?
I think one temporary option is to just circumvent this problem on each Steem site. I’m trying to think through a solution to this for the site I’m building, and hopefully there’s something that will work well enough. But long term, this will need to be addressed on the blockchain itself. I think this would eliminate a pretty huge shortcoming of Steem if it is implemented and I’m really curious to hear if it’s in the works.
What do you think about the payout window? If I’m missing something and there’s a clear reason for all of this, please let me know! I just can’t seem to figure it out.
Thanks for watching! 😀
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It is a limitation of the tech, as far as I know.
Ah, okay. Do you think it would be possible to implement something in a steem site's interface that organizes reposting every 7 days and shows the total rewards under a single permalink for the post?
I guess maybe it's still pretty early, and maybe not worth it at this point, but I've been wondering if that type of thing would be possible.
Personally I think the main reason for it is a game theory one. The fact you can only receive rewards for one weeks means there is a constant flow of content. It forces action. If less people decide to post the reward pool is shared by less and each individual receives a bigger share. This keeps people posting (aka using the platform).
If you could receive payouts on older posts I would expect it to skew the stake holders even further than it already is. Older accounts would accrue extreme value even if they no longer use the platform. Wether the older posts deserve bigger payouts (many do) or not it would be bad for the platform as a whole to reward people who may not be invested still.
I’m sure there could be a tech solution but it might make the blockchain massive. After a week the values are locked in. You could do a recurring weekly window but that would increase the blockchain by (posts * weeks) probably making it “too big” and querying posts might have to daisy chain through multiple blocks to get a final value (taking a long time).
I’ve thought of a couple solutions for apps I’m working on to refresh the rewards as well as a super-vote which could let you vote 5x on a single piece of content. I’m sceptical if they are good ideas though.
Wow, awesome points/insight -- I hadn't really thought about it like that. I'm going to have to let those ideas percolate for a little while before completely giving up on the idea that the 7 day payout window should be changed, but I think you just made too many good arguments for me not to come to the same conclusion. 🙂
I'm not familiar with game theory, but I guess the main thing I need to wrap my head around is that the rewards pool is a fixed quantity of STEEM. So the actual dollar value of the rewards pool can go up if the price of STEEM goes up, but because the pool is inherently limited I can't look at it in the same way as something like YouTube. On YouTube growth in payout value is only limited by how many ad dollars are coming in. Am I thinking through that correctly?
And that's a great point about some sort of tech solution leading to a huge and unwieldy blockchain. My thinking for how I would try doing it, would be to set up an object for each post on my site that holds the permalinks of all steem posts. After the first 7 days, I would grab the final value of the post and store it in my database, and then post a comment on that post to be used solely for upvoting. Then after 7 days it would grab the final value from the comment and post a new comment, etc. It would look pretty ugly on Steemit.com, but I could hide the post chain on my site, and that way the only queries to get the total value would be a call to the most recent post and the one for the total from my database. But that's true it would just make the blockchain huge.
Thanks again for your comment! I guess maybe this type of thing will make more sense as I learn more about it. 👍
Yes I think because the quantity of STEEM released is limited It requires a slightly different take on how earning is viewed. I have not checked in awhile but I believe it is ~700k STEEM per week, the entire blockchain is currently at a 9.5% inflation rate (set to reduce 0.5 each year down to 0.5%). This is why everyone get's mad at people who take massive rewards, it directly reduces everyone else's.
If you could get rewards for older content we would probably be getting a lot less rewards in the first week. It might balance out over a long period of time but would massively favour long-standing creators and make it even more difficult to see any results when first starting.
Pretty much exactly the implementation I was thinking off too. You could make it only post the new comment when someone actually comes to upvote the older content, that way it's not happening automatically for all posts.
Every time I look into the mechanics of STEEM @dan has thought of everything. Everything about STEEM seems to be by design and not just because, I try to question what I am missing if something doesn't seem right at first. I'm pretty excited about EOS just because of Dans work on STEEM
That's a great point that the comments could be posted only when someone tries to upvote a post after the 7 day window. My initial thought when I read that was how in that case only a very small percentage of posts would get votes after 7 days, so the overall effect on the size of the blockchain might not be huge at first. But then I realized this would open things up for rewards pool abuse, like people had mentioned before. It would be hard to stop people from setting up a recurring upvote on all/some of their posts that just repeats every 7 days, which would discourage creating new content like you mentioned. And I guess it would only be a matter of time before it still led to the blockchain getting too large.
Yeah I'd like to keep learning more about EOS. I have a bit right now just because it sounded promising, but I'm still trying to understand STEEM better so I haven't invested a ton of time to researching other projects. Will be interesting to see how EOS develops this year after the actual tokens are released.
Thanks again for your comments and explaining all of this to me! Would you mind if I made a follow up video summarizing some of the points you made? Totally understand if you'd rather I don't!
Also have not dedicated much time to learning about EOS yet, learning STEEM is a big enough task. Lisk also looks interesting, another POS chain and their main sdk is Javascript.
👍 No worries at all dude. Make the video. Interested to hear the summary.
Oh awesome, will have a look at Lisk!
And will definitely make the video! I think trying to figure out how to summarize it will help me understand it too. 🤓
So true, I also cannot see why this is, as I often find some posts that I find interesting and valuable, but it is over the 7 day reward period so voting for it means nothing, financially at least. I do think it still deserves some reward, as it's value to the reader does not diminish so too should it's financial reward not diminish, in this case disappear all together.
good point, hopefully this could be remedied soon :-)
stay blessed.
resteemed
Thanks for watching! 🙂
Hey Jeff, this is something I 100% agree with. Are you ok discord by any chance? My username is dnews.
Please swing by and get In touch :)
Great insights!
Thanks for watching! I'll reach out on Discord 😀
After seven days additional upvotes should pay the author, if it isn’t that way it should be upvoted!
Yeah, right now upvotes after 7 days do not pay the author.
Thanks for watching!
I second @sambillingham's thoughts on this.
I also have noticed that the vast majority of the rewards on your post are added within the first hour of posting. At least for minnows like myself, anyway. Hence, the added benefit of keeping the payout going indefinitely is really very low.
The greater benefit is to let your post sit awhile - a few months or so, then recycle it as a new post!
Yeah, after hearing his argument I agree too. Part of the reason I enjoy making videos is so people can point out the holes in my thinking :P
Thanks for watching!
Interesting