Regulating Curation on SteemIt
Apparently there is a movement among the whales to increase the ratio of curation rewards to author rewards from 25%/75% to 50%/50% .
The thought behind this action is that increasing the curation rewards would increase curation activity.
I believe this thinking is incorrect. The reason I think this is wrong is because curation activity is currently driven by the refresh rate of the curation rewards. The curation rewards refresh at 20% a day. I check SteemD before and after each curation session. Replace my handle with your handle to see your page.
https://steemd.com/@yintercept
This is what my curation rewards looked like after an active curation session.
If you log in once a day; you might as well curate until the bar is at 80%. I guess if you are taking a three day vacation, you might as well drop 30 votes.
Since curation activity is regulated by the refresh rate of comment, changing curation/author ratio will not have a big effect on curation activity. The only effect it will have is to reduce the rewards received by authors.
The amount of curation rewards an account receives is determined by their STEEM POWER. If you peek at the wallets of plankton accounts, you will see that plankton accounts usually only get a penny or two curation rewards a week. Whales get huge curation rewards.
Increasing the ratio of curation/author rewards will dramatically reduce the ability of plankton accounts (new accounts) to make money.
If you go into SteemD, you will notice on the right hand column two rows called curation rewards and posting rewards.
Curation rewards 507
Posting rewards 27,966
SteemD doesn't tell us the units. The ratio seems correct for my account. Changing from 25/75 to 50/50 should double the curation reward to 1014, but it would reduce the curation rewards by a third to 18644.
If I understand these figures on SteemD correctly, under a 50/50 regime, I would see my rewards drop from 28473 to 19658. A drop of 8815 rewards.
I have made an effort front-run rewards. The ratio of curation to post rewards for most small accounts is lower than my ratio.
I visited the SteemD account for several bots. Bots tend to receive a large ratio of curation rewards to post rewards.
So the change from 25/75 to 50/50 would have an effect of reducing earnings of small accounts by about 30% and redistribute this income to whales and bots.
I don't like it. Since the curation activity is determined by the refresh rate of voting power, the change will not have a positive effect on curation activity. All that the change will do is reduce the rewards received by new accounts and feed it to the whales and bots.
As Steem Pope, I cannot grant my blessing to changes that are transparent attempts to reward whales and bots. Curate to promote quality content, not for profit. In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing curation switch toward a 90%/10% model and a proportionate increase in the number of votes one can make in a day..
Authors get a jolt of dopamine when readers angage with their content - in a way they already received their reward. But curators do not get anything beyond the payment itself (not to mention curation share of rewards is distributed between all curators accordingly)
Here is $0.15 poll on curation rewards with some useful references.
Higher curation rewards should also reduce profitability of promotion bots.
Who gave you the right to be Steem Pope?
I gave myself the title a long time ago. It was largely as a joke, and I use it when I want to make a slightly tongue-in-cheek pompous declaration, or when I want to offer occasional advice to newbies on ethical behavior here.
❤️😂
Flawed thinking. Incentives matter and they are primary drivers on Steem. Curate to promote quality content and get rewarded. Otherwise why not use bots and self vote?
Incentives matter. No argument there. As it stands now, minnows receive no curation rewards. We need incentives to reward creating quality content, and ideally, a reward mechanism for flagging the spam, plagiarism, and abuse in the system.
I think the 75/25 split is probably about right. 50/50 is skewed to reward whales and bots. Perhaps 90/10 is overkill, but I for one curate without really trying to game the system for profit.
And that's the crux of it. Which do you think is likely to bring minnows into the curation game earlier? Give them 50% or give them 10%?
I'd rather have 10,000 minnows curating than a single whale with the same Steem Power. And I'd rather have either of those than having that Steem sitting on the exchanges in liquid form.
Delegating to plankton has a bigger effect on curation than any other ploy. The problem is finding the people who will invest time in delegation and who will hold onto the SP.
I wrote a post on how on could created a program for dedicated curators that would reward avid curators while encouraging both the curators and authors to hold SP.
It does make a little sense the way things stand now. Newcomers need to create in order to earn the power to curate. Curators need to work more to find new creators to curate. I'm not placing myself on a pedestal here. I need to work more, too. However, I do focus my efforts on curating a number of posts from small-time players and rarely upvote anyone big except for @papa-pepper.
No amount of algorithm shuffling can change people. We need to set an example for the minnows by curating, commenting, and engaging. We need to proactively hunt the spammers and plagiarists, too. This matters far more than shuffling the reward pool to further cut off minnows from posting rewards they already struggle to earn as it is.
I really don't understand why people think 50/50 would benefit Steemit, it certainly would benefit curators (the ones with large SP) but the authors? Rewards are a finite daily resource, say 80,000 Steem daily (this is just a number, I don't know what the reward pool is), right now authors would get 60,000 with 50/50 they get 40,000 and that's it, curators would jump from 20,000 to 40,000 why would they change their voting habits if all of a sudden they will be getting 100% more for what they are already doing? So yes whales and large stakeholders will benefit, no one else will.
I completely agree with you.You have got it right.Now it's not about just the whales,whales are earning fine.Now all the whales have to think about the minnows.But that 50/50 will certainly not do any good for the new comers or the minnows who are already existing.Thanks @gduran for the veluable opinion.
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.)
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:
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
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.
Curation is cheaper and adds more value to the network than posts, it'd make sense that the whales are toying with this idea.
When talking about posts, one needs to separate base posts from replies.
Replies provide real world feedback and encourage actual dialog.
HF20 did a great job reducing spammy posts. Since they give replies the same weight as posts, they suppressed both new threads and replies.
PS: the best way to handle the resource credits for replies is to make comments thread aware. Adding a reply in a thread in which one is already engaged should not cost as much as creating a new thread or replying to t a new thread.
I agree. It's funny how so many already curate and paid so little and do it anyways. Meanwhile, we're supposed to "trust" the rich on the platform to actually care to curate if we give them double... lol. Why do't they already care to curate? They already make a lot more than the small fish... yet that isn't "good enough". It's all about the money, not making curation any better. The bots and vote sellers will be the ones that benefit the most. Resteemed the post as it's a good basic down-lo of the issue ;)
Nice to see that you support this @krnel :)
I agree as well. This is in favor for those with capital, and against the labor, or to say, against the ones who are actively posting.
it is just a move by people with a lot of sp to try to gain more profits. It is another blow into the face of small accounts that make literally all their income from posting and that do not have a meaning-full vote.
Steem economic system is not that well designed, by giving more power to large holders it is not going to change. But when the big players are in controll, they will vote for changes they like. Lets hope they are smart enough to realise that their success depends on adoption of steem and a 50/50 split is not going to help.
Small accounts get an average of zero to 3 cents per post, NO MATTER how good their content is. Sure after 50/50 the whales will get more rewards, but every good curator will as well. After all STEEMIT was designed as a content discovery platform. So the best posts should get the most rewards. But this is impossible under 75/25 model. There is just no incentive to vote the best content when a simple self upvote or bot delegation is much more profitable.
And the minnows' curation rewards will increase as well. If the minnow is a good curator he might even make 10 to 20 cents in curation per full upvote after this change, which is impossible now. You would just have to be among the first to discover good content.
This platform has always favored the ones who trust in it and invest FIRST! If you think that you can make a decent amount of money here without investing first, dream on.
why change your post instead of replying to my comment?
Anyways, I never claimed that first investors should be stripped of their influence. I also dont think free money is sustainable, ever. And that is part of the problem with steem. Steem is too much free money. Think if we had advertisement. Then we would just pay the person putting the add and maybe people that resteem to increase visibility. No more artificial rewards out of thin air but a logical business model with a natural flow of rewards.
But this is not steem. We have a game theoretical model of upvoting and are discussing how to best make free money appear. And that is a very tough question. I think that most people arguing for or against 50% do not have the statistical or game theoretical background to do so. These systems are very complex and there is no simple logic because there is no real market flow. So why risk breaking something that is not broken?
For example voting at a fundamental level is ignorant of the content. Curation is the game of voting first what others will vote later. If you know self-voters, vote on them first. No matter the content. Curation is a voting amplification, not a method to find good content.
From a game theoretical perspective, we always need people that do not follow the optimum strategy and make a loss to curate good content. There is simply no way around it. Not at 0%, 50% or 100%. Yet people believe that 50% would magically transform the system when I think that 50% will just give rise to a new strategy of abuse that may or may not be better than what we currently have.
In the end I dont care that much. My stake here is low and if this goes wrong I will just loose a few thousand $. But people that have a substantial stake should be careful what they do. And if I were among them I would be very careful to use simple flawed logic to change a fundamental part of the system which risks breaking it.
Yep.
Because of this I reckon that putting out good content should be the driver of income on Steem, not discovering it. Curation as presently implemented is quality agnostic. It is profit driven. Removing the profit motive from curation removes the motivation for agnosticism, which is profit.
I favor reducing curation rewards to 0. If whales want to make money with their Steem, let them post content, not profit from the content others post. There remains another profit mechanism that is also content agnostic available to whales, and that is capital gains. Any increase in the price of an investment is capital gain to investors. Throughout history, this has been the mechanism that has driven investment.
Curation rewards have created profiteering mechanisms that allow profit to be generated without increasing the value of the underlying investment, and this type of mechanism depresses the value of the vehicle, in this case, Steem. There are various mechanisms that potentiate profiteering, rather than investing, and they create downwards pressure on Steem price.
Consider a broom manufacturer seeking investment to improve production. Should they promise investors half the brooms they produce? No. Selling the brooms creates profit for the manufacturer, which increases the value of the stock investors purchase, creating capital gains. Just so, allowing accounts with SP to extract rewards through curation decreases the value of content - which is the driver of value of Steem (as the token underlying social media interfaces, such as Steemit).
Even giving investors 25% of the brooms is sketchy from an investment perspective, and that's what we have now with a 75/25 split.
Let investors increase the value of their capital by boosting the value of the token they invest in, which increases in value as more people create more good content.
Profiteers should be chased off with tar and feathers, since they extract the capital which the rest of us, creators and investors alike, depend on.
Thanks!
Exactly. It may seem that 50% curation would help the bigger accounts, but there is no free lunch. 50% curation rewards hurt the steem economy and that directly cuts into the pockets of the holders.
In addition, instead of just voting as you please, bigger accounts will be even more forced to vote algorithmically to not miss out compared to others that do so. Instead when curation is removed, big accounts do not have to try to outsmart each other and can focus their energy on promoting steem, which is the only proper way to get more money out of their investment.
Not all whales are experienced investors, and, while the ninja miners are certainly intelligent, we shall have to see if they gain the necessary understanding to grow their stakes, or, like lotto winners broke a year later, lament the poor decisions that leave them as broke as before their windfall. It is counterintuitive to realize that grabbing all the cash one can and maximizing short term ROI can be harmful to ones financial position. Some folks do grasp how investing differs from profiteering, and the blatant censorship being undertaken on competing media present a remarkable opportunity to grow a platform and create unimaginable wealth in the process.
The disruptive nature of cryptocurrency lends some hope that investors in Steem may yet prevail, as censorship is a means of retaining control, and Steem natively disrupts the extant banksters. There is a natural concordance between the two purposes of implementing a censorship resistant media and growing the value of Steem. Even should some whales sellout to Goldman Sachs, I don't think the war will be lost.
Rather, I reckon the acquisition of stake by GS would drive deep into some the fact of the potential of Steem to be more than just a quick profit opportunity, even more than an emunerative career, but such a game-changer that playing it well could replace the top players. This contest hasn't really started yet, IMHO.
The driving question behind the 50/50 decision is: who does SteemIt want as investors. I've read several whale accounts. They appear to want to bring Wall Street in as the primary ... just as Wall Street is the primary investor in the rest of social media.
The question is: How can we get Goldman Sachs to buy a million Steem. Not, how can SteemIt attract and retain a million users.
STEEM is a deflationary currency. The only way to get Goldman Sachs to buy a million STEEM would be to have mechanisms where Goldman Sachs can harvest a lion's share of the rewards pool.
Goldman Sachs could harvest the reward pool with bots and the new 50/50 reward pool.
SteemIt would could then scoff at the useful idiots who thought the company was trying to create something for the people, when they are looking for the first chance to sell to the 1%.
I spose you're right, but it doesn't have to go that way, and if it does, another UI will do what ordinary folks want to do, which isn't to heel to Goldman Sachs yanks on the choke chain, but to relate to one another freely.
SMTs may provide both directions of progress, without going off the Steem reservation. I don't know @ned and the Stinc team well enough to say they'll do this or that with confidence. I have discussed this a bit long ago with @ned briefly (offchain) and find him forthright and bright - at worst. While I can't predict what he'll do, he has kept his word to me, even though it was months later, and I had given up by then. I reckon he could grab all the cash he can and run, but I do suspect he has specific goals that aren't purely financial that he is intent on achieving.
I find it odd that so much depends on such fungible and ineffable things as principles, standards, and spine. It is literally impossible to imagine what the world may transition to if he personally holds a particular view, or doesn't. Even more odd, that's true for all of us, and we can't predict how we impact key personnel with our casual talk. A chance word can change the world forever. All I do know for sure is that he did, in time, fulfill a commitment he made to me, and while that's little to base a prediction on the future of social media on, it's a good sign.
Those that ask that question aren't looking past their own bank accounts. For them, cash is king. Warren Buffet would ask the latter question, because he's an investor, not a profiteer. @ned doesn't strike me as a profiteer, and his remarks in Korea last year show he's not merely an investor either. I hope he's a leader, and seeking to blaze a trail into a future where the people of the world can create communities at their sole option, and not need to buy from Goldman Sachs the privilege of joining theirs.
Thanks!
I started using SteemIt because I felt the platform was infused with youthful idealism. For the platform to maintain that ideal the platform has to figure out how to get a large number of people to have a moderate investment in STEEM POWER.
It is a tough game. I actually feel that there is a core of people in the company that has its eyes on larger communities and not just the price of STEEM. The investment bankers have knocked the idealism out of numerous computer companies in the past.
What you state is not true at all. Minnows make noting from curation. This is because with their small sp they do not get even 0.001 steem. A boost to 50% would help, but curation rewards would still be unreliable and subject to big loss from rounding. It currently takes about 100sp to reliably get some small curation rewards. Everyone below that is effectively excluded from curation.
When I started i made literally 100% from author rewards. The change will certainly hurt minnows.
Furthermore a 50% curation reward does not realign the incentives. Self-voting is still better than curating content. Right now it is possible to make money from curating, but that only when you place tiny strategically places votes. With 50% that becomes a bit better, but nowhere close enough to make a positive change.
Curation is a game and there are strategies to maximise rewards. But fundamentally it relies on the willingness of some people to forgo this optimum strategy and reward good content. That can be proven game theoretically.
Now the system can be set up in such a way that a good strategy is to follow these few nice people that break the symmetry of the game and amplify their vote. 50/50 could do that, but at the same time it hurts the producers that the nice people want to reward. Reality is complex and we probably need a statistical simulation of participants to see. My impression is that 50/50 will not be better and feels even more artificial than the 100/0 which is simply a pure tipping system.
Hey @yintercept, I share some concerns about raising the curation share to 50%, but your argumentation may be a bit misleading. Let me clear up a few points:
What's being "consumed" when voting is "voting mana" or "voting power" as shown on steemd. The more you vote per day, the less your vote is worth. This affects both the author and the curation share of your vote in the same way. Voting power/mana regenerates with 20% per day. You can make decent curation rewards with low VP and you can make no curation rewards even if you vote with 100% VP. The number of votes per day is limited, and everybody is affected by this in the same way. Curation rewards is what you make out of it.
The amount of curation rewards is determined by the value of your vote (depending on SP, VP and %) in relation to the value of all votes before yours and all values after yours. Additionally, there's the reverse auction system within the first 15 mins that makes sure that just being the first to vote doesn't pay off. Additionally, more smaller votes can give higher returns in curation rewards compared to fewer but larger votes. However, there is a minimum share of curation rewards each vote receives - this seems to give the good returns for whales with large votes, but if you do the math and look at the vote value given in relation to the amount of curation rewards received, this isn't so good at the end.
The 'curation rewards' and 'posting rewards' column on steemd are in STEEM - this is the total sum of STEEM that was taken out of the reward pool and credited to you since your account exists. This metric is strongly influenced by the reward pool size and the STEEM price at the time the corresponding posts/comments payed out and tells nothing about the author/curator share. Doubling the curation share and reducing the posting share as an example for a 50/50 share makes no sense.
Nevertheless, I share the general concerns about 50/50. Buying votes might get less profitable and bot owners would have to constantly power down to pay their delegators from the increased curation rewards in order to keep the delegation returns at the same level as now. I guess the big winners would be curation bots and not human curators.
Thanks for the great info on the stats. I wasn't sure what "curation reward" and "posting rewards" measured. The ratio of the two figures shows how much rewards I've received from the two activities.
As I understand the rewards are based on VESTS and not SP. An upvote takes my VESTS multiplies it by Voting Power and Voting Weight. My portion of the curation rewards is based on when I voted, my VESTS and my position in the queue.
As an account in the plankton, my vests are small. Most of my curation rewards are under a penny. I managed to front run a bot last week and made my first votes that measured over a penny. It was fun but not life changing.
I wrote a post about how one could use the delegation system to create a program for dedicated curators. This system would give direct rewards to curation while encouraging both authors and curators to hold STEEM.
Please read this. You either haven’t seen plenty of points that have already addressed your concerns or you’re just ignoring them.
https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-david/improved-curation-rewards-are-still-a-necessity
This is not true. It would only initially reduce rewards for those who rely solely on post rewards for “income.” As behavior and investment habits change, posting rewards could easily increase as a whole due to better incentives for buying and holding STEEM as SP.
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STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:
You are absolutely correct, and those agitating for increased curation rewards either know this and promote it disingenuously, or don't and believe curation action is driven by content quality - which it isn't, because of the profit motive. If it was driven by content quality then plankton that posted high quality posts would not be plankton for long, as curation activity was drawn to their posts. But curation activity is drawn by profitability, not quality content. Plankton posts are unlikely to draw votes such that curating them is profitable.
Capital gains has driven investment since time immemorial, and is a suitable mechanism to profit investors. That mechanism has functioned to drive industry from chipping rocks and making pointy sticks to aircraft carriers and F35 fighters. It's highly functional, robust, and only flawed insofar as alternative mechanisms to extract profit from production besides sales of products are extant.
Social media platforms aren't driven by content alone, as society is a vastly complex entity, but content quality as determined by users is the product that increases the value of the Steem token - the investment vehicle subject to capital gains. Curation is an alternative mechanism that allows profit to be extracted before it can increase the value of Steem, which depresses the price of Steem, and harms creators and investors alike. It is a parasitic siphon of profits that would otherwise fund content creation and capital gains.
We can see from other (non-tokenized) social media that folks will upvote (like) content without any curation reward whatsoever, and dropping curation rewards altogether won't eliminate upvotes, but will eliminate that particular vector for profiteering - which will be good for investors and creators by restoring the financial incentives to create content and invest in Steem for capital gains.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Creating content is work. Being rewarded financially for work is reasonable. Upvoting content others make isn't work, and curation rewards pretend to be free lunch. However, they're not free, as the funds extracted via curation decrease the funds paid the workers who make the content. Worse yet, they extract the increase in value of the Steem token that would create capital gains for investors, decreasing the motivation to invest in Steem.
Gains and profit aren't bad, if they are derived from activity that increases the value of the productive endeavor. For Steem increasing that value means rewarding content that is popular and upvoted. Funds that are diverted from rewarding content are diverted from producing that content, and that content also drives the value of the token, so curation rewards also decrease capital gains and harm investors. Curation is parasitism of capital in the present system, and increasing the extraction of capital via parasitism will harm creators and investors alike.
Thanks!