RE: Elimination of Curation Rewards
But wait, shouldn't curators get paid for their work?
If they do their job well - they will.
The value of SP will come if we can build a platform that attracts and retains billions of users, in a way that keeps them actively engaged in the site. With a large and engaged audience, that gives us the ability to build a revenue model (such as advertisements) on top of those users. That revenue can be turned into passive earnings for all SP holders.
Every word there also applies to author rewards. Should we eliminate those too? IMO, Paying someone for their labor means that they should be paid in proportion to the work they do or the value that they add. A generalized reward that's available to every steem holder does not qualify as payment. Lanier addressed this point, too:
The usual counterargument to that is that they are being paid in the sense that they too benefit from all the free stuff and reduced-cost stuff that comes out of the system. I don't buy that argument, because you need formal economic benefit to have a civilization, not just informal economic benefit. The difference between a slum and the city is whether everybody gets by on day-to-day informal benefits or real formal benefits.
Personally, I am an advocate of letting authors set their own curation percentage and use that as another lever in the competition for up-votes. New authors could set their curation percentage high to attract voters. Established authors could throttle it down and keep more for themselves. Although, I imagine that might be difficult to implement with the current blockchain design.
Probably the huge difference is that paying for content drives the quality of content up, as outlined in the photography example in the post. Paying for voting does not drive up the quality of voting, as described in the post.
It's not a bad idea, and one that was brought up during the HF discussion. It would be interesting to see something like this played out, although it would add a lot of complexity to the system. And just stating the obviously (not that it is a horrible thing) but it would essentially be a form of vote buying / bribery.
I'm not totally convinced of that. streemian, steemvoter, and autosteem have enabled hundreds of thousands or millions of votes that would not have been cast otherwise. That probably wouldn't have happened without the incentive that curation rewards provide, and we have no idea what the platform would have been like without them. Also, we have yet to see how things play out in the long term. Many people are still unfamiliar with the rewards rules.
I have thought that it would be interesting to see what happens if bots and guilds all shut down voluntarily at the same time for a couple of days. My guess is that a small number of authors would like it a lot and most would not. I doubt if we'd be able to coordinate that experiment, though.
Maybe. Or maybe it's just an inducement to evaluate a post that a curator might have otherwise ignored. I doubt if many people would intentionally vote on poor quality posts just for a tiny curation reward, especially knowing that it's likely to be a wasted vote because other voters won't do the same. Either way, as long as it's transparent, I don't see it as a problem. The complexity would be my bigger concern, and may well be a "show stopper."