RE: Elimination of Curation Rewards
I believe Curation Rewards could exist, but I do think the algorithm has some issues that do incentivize dog piling, finding people that are followed by bots and voting on them whether you read it or not.
In fact, the "shouldn't curators get paid for their work?" Payment can be viewed in several ways. If you are encouraging an author that you really like to produce more content, then their content could almost be viewed as a form of payment.
I do believe there can be a happy medium, but I believe the current algorithm places too much emphasis in such a way they results in dog piling more than quality. Quality still happens, but with bots you end up with people that always get up voted by the same bot. Some of their content likely should not be worth that much. What about the gems out there that are not an established author that are ignored, because your daily bot votes used up how many votes you are going to place for the day?
I look at steemit/busy.org a bit different than a lot of people.
I view my steem power more like the potential guaranteed income I have to purchase goods on steemit for that day. It doesn't actually cost me anything in reality, but it is there for me to spend like a virtual currency.
How do I spend it? I walk into a store full of content, and just like walking into a bookstore, or music store, or any other store I walk PAST the things I don't like, and I vote on the things I do. Me powering up increases my ability to reward content creators I like (posts, and comments) and being able to reward them better means I'll likely get more content I like.
I personally do not use a bot, though I am more than capable of writing one. I actually read the things I up vote. I will occasionally up vote things I may not agree with completely simply due to the sheer effort and thought I can tell the content creator put into the work.
I believe the current curation system has flaws. Yet so does many other things. We are working through those.
I do think that algorithm might be worthy of some tweaking...
Also as far as rewards from curation... Unless you have a substantial amount of steem power those rewards are very very low even with the current system.
https://steemit.com/curation/@sigmajin/an-opponent-of-the-exponent-making-the-case-for-vshare-linearity
Take a look at this, it goes back to some of the stuff we talked about in the downvote thread, and i think its a much more workable solution to curation problems
I am in favor of doing both. (Removing curation rewards, and switching to a more linear rewards formula.)
Obviously, im not. But i will say that even if I were strongly in favor of eliminating curation rewards, i would not be in favor of doing the two simultaneously.
I think that there is a very strong case to be made that a more linear reward distribution formula could fix many of the percieved problems with curation rewards. IMO, we should at least see what effect the changes have before we throw the baby out with the bath water.
I'd go in reverse, removal than adjustments, but I do agree that they shouldn't happen at the same time.
I think the bigger problem isn't how the rewards are distributed, it's the fact the motivation of each voter comes from the desire to earn a reward. It seems almost like a conflict of interest. I want popular/trending content on the site to be elevated because people find it interesting, not because they believe it will provide them with the greatest reward.
When considering the act of voting, you shouldn't be considering yourself, you should be considering only the content on which you're voting.
That's what I believe at least :)
Whatever you think which one is bigger, I think both of them are big problems ;)
Good comment! I just wanted to make the observation that people are going to think of themselves when voting anyways, even if what they are thinking is that they could later be asked to justify the vote because it can be traced back to them.
Well said. I totally agree.
One interesting thing though - technically the current algorithm discourages "dog piling". If you vote on a post that already has a high payout, you get less than if you vote on a post before it receives a high payout.
The problem is probably better described in that it encourages voting behavior based on the predictions of what posts will receive a high payout. In theory this was supposed to be one and the same as "good" content, but in practice these two things have turned out to be different.