RE: Let's Remove The 7 Day Payout Window
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. 🤓