RE: Regulating Curation on SteemIt
I'm no whale, but I support the 50/50 rewards idea. (What I would really like to see is for authors to be able to choose their own reward ratio when they submit their posts so each author could use curation rewards to attract an audience and find their own ideal value, but that's not gonna happen any time soon. I very much doubt if there's a very good one size fits all solution.)
The thought behind this action is that increasing the curation rewards would increase curation activity.
For me, among other things, the thinking is that: (i) Increasing curation rewards would make Steem a more attractive investment, which would bring more people to Steem and increase its value; (ii) It would encourage authors to power-up more of their author rewards instead of dumping them on the market right away, which would also increase Steem's value; (iii) It would boost the ratio of readers-to-authors in order for authors to get more visibility; (iv) At Steem's new, higher value, and with larger audiences, authors would earn more, even though their percentage is lower.
So yes, I agree with your statement that it would increase curation activity, but that's only a small part of it. I think it would also benefit authors and attract investors.
What do you think should be the number of readers per author? Forget about rewards for a moment. Do you think Steem's high quality authors are getting anywhere near the audience size that they deserve? If you agree with me that authors here deserve much larger audiences than they are currently getting, what effect do you think the 50/50 curation reward would have on the size of each author's audience?
Update: FYI, Here is the best description I've seen of how voting works. That was probably written when the "voting target" was 40 per day instead of the 10 per day that we have now, but the rest should be similar. When I read it, the part that surprised me was this:
Surprising news: if you want to maximize your total influence, it doesn't matter how much you vote, as long as you vote more than about 27 times per day. Your total influence is the same whether you vote 1000 times per day or 27. This is because of the constant drip of voting power filling your tank.
I guess we would replace "27" with "7" or "8" today.
FYI exactly that is supposed to be implemented on Golos by the next HF scheduled on Nov 22
Oh, that's great. I wish I could speak Russian. That has been my wish here for quite some time. I'm eager to see how it works out.
It looks like only 14 top witnesses have voted for that so no consensus so far (
But maybe later...
Oh, that's too bad. Thanks for the update! I was going to ask you how it went.
Well, at least the code is ready and somehow tested and only 3 more witnesses are needed so I do hope for the next HF.
Initially it was looking like the consensus is there, otherwise the devs wouldn't even work on code, but it seems that someone had suggested that the curators rather then autors should regulate the percentage and that messed the things up.
That's an interesting concept, but I'd have to see the specifics. I'm not clear on how it could be implemented, or what would prevent the curators from just always choosing the maximum possible value for curation rewards.
FYI Golos have made HF yesterday adding a lot of new parameters to Consensus State, including min_curation_reward and max_curation_reward.
Last time I've checked it was min 25, max 50.
The author is supposed to be able to choose anything between min and max
https://explorer.golos.io
Nice. Thanks for the update. I'm eager to see how it works out.
For me the concept doesn't make much sense, because right now If you feel as a curator you should get like 95% from you vote, you could always vote with 5% for the post, then just make the "nice post" comment and vote with 95% for your own comment )
So I hope that was just some temporary turmoil.
Agreed, I think it makes sense in theory.
SteemIt doesn't post the hit count anywhere, does it?
A long time ago I read a post that said SteemIt had a hit counter, but removed it. Hit counters are easy to manipulate.
Without hit counters, we don't know how many people read an article.
My observation on general sites, BTW, is that general public usually doesn't find an article until after the search engines scour the web. The general public usually finds articles several weeks after the article has been published. SteemIt authors don't get any reward for the general web traffic that they bring to the site.
Anyway, I can only write about the data that is provided to me. All of the data I have seen shows that the amount of curation is driven by the refresh rate of voting power.
That means that changing to the 50/50 structure won't increase curation activity, it will simply drop the author rewards by 30%.
The question of how one can bring in users that buy STEEM POWER and how to keep authors for powering down in a completely different question. I don't see a change to a 50/50 structure bringing in new casual readers.
PPS: There may be some value in creating special reader accounts.
Such readers are better motivated by delegation than by changing the curation reward structure.
They had view counters for a while, but they disappeared without comment. I had assumed that it was because the view numbers were so low. It looked sort-of silly when a post with 5 views was getting $300 in rewards.
By 33% in terms of Steem power, but (hopefully) the increase in audience size and the value of Steem would more than compensate for that drop, and the end result would be an increase in satisfaction and reward value. You're right, we can't know the effect of a change until we try it, but it would be simple enough to reverse the change if it didn't work as hoped. Maybe, before implementation, the community should insist on some metrics and a checkpoint date to see if the change worked as intended and - if not - reverse it.
Also, when you talk about the recharge rate, you're assuming that the number of voters stays the same. I believe that wouldn't happen. A way to look at it is that by adding voters and moving Steem from the exchanges to powered-up wallets, we'd (hopefully) be speeding up the aggregate recharge rate.
When counting readers one has to consider two groups: Readers with STEEM POWER and readers without. Most casual readers will not invest in STEEM POWER. Increasing the curation reward really does nothing for casual readers with little STEEM POWER. Their curation rewards will be at most a few pennies a week.
The audience you are looking at is people who want to invest in STEEM and who like curating, but don't like posting.
A better approach to this audience would be to create a program specifically for them. This could be done with with a SteemConnect app and delegation.
For example one might offer a matching delegation. This type of product would best be done through SteemConnect.
A person who wants to read without writing could say: I want to be a dedicated curator.
They would go to a busy.org clone that counts the articles that they read.
Steemit bloggers could delegate SP to a central account which would then give these dedicated readers a matching delegation. By matching delegation I simply mean that their delegation would increase as their SP increases. It would decrease if they powered down.
Creating a system that directly rewarded people for curating would do a better job rewarding curators than the 50/50 split. I might write this up as a new post.
You're right that the curation split won't (directly) attract readers who don't have Steem Power, but current incentives lean too heavily towards content creation, and not heavily enough towards content discovery. I believe that's part of the reason for the low engagement (unless one writes about Steem ;-). If voters do a better job at content discovery, it should draw uninvested readers as a 2nd-order effect.
Yes, there are a variety of possible third party work-arounds. But if we get the incentive structure right on the blockchain itself, then we shouldn't need third party hacks to make up for the deficiencies.