The Reduced Author Rewards of The Economic Improvement Proposal is Moronic and Unfair
![](https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://media.giphy.com/media/Sttv5WXZxz59IDXtTt/giphy.gif)
As a creator, one of the reasons I gave this radical platform a chance, and advocated for artists and consumers alike to join, were the generous cryptocurrency rewards paid to the author. The 75% allocation to the authors on the Steem network demonstrated to me that as a social platform, the team behind it were willing to put their money where their mouths were and reward the people who made the platform worth visiting.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, you are rewarded for creating or sharing good content. To their credit, YouTube is the only one of the social networks that dares to share in the prosperity generated by its users. That said, YouTube's rewards were - and still are - small. Just like Spotify, the musician's compensation for being listened to, watched or shared still amounts to paltry sums unless you are garnering tens of millions of views. So while there are rewards to be had, they are very difficult to achieve.
Now there's Steem, which completely inverts the dynamic. Authors are no longer an afterthought. They are centric to the platform, and as such they are the entities that are rewarded the most. It's also much, much easier to earn. What a novel idea! Instead of keeping all the compensation for the content generated by its users, a social network that rewards them and in an effortless way, by voting on their content. I know, it's truly shocking.
Right away I noticed a difference when I started posting on the Steem network. I've earned as much as $65 for a post and $0.01, but I've always earned SOMETHING for my efforts. On the aforementioned platforms, I've earned absolutely nothing, even from YouTube.
What hasn't changed from YouTube to Steem is the effort it takes to create thoughtful content. Each Satoshi I've earned on Steem I've worked really hard for, so it was infuriating to read within the EIP there there was a proposal to reduce author rewards and allocate them to curators. I became angry enough to write this after reading @timcliff's post about the rewards being reduced to proposed 50%.
So why is this change being proposed?
From Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal on @steemitblog.
Increasing the percentage of rewards that are distributed to curators. One of the problems with Steem as it stands is that there is a strong incentive to self-vote. The more rewards are distributed to curators the less incentive there is to self-vote. At the same time, if curation is improved, then those content creators who are currently submitting great content which isn’t getting seen, should stand to benefit as that content will be more likely to get unearthed.
This may very well be true, but reducing author payout in favor of curators is not the answer. Furthermore, from what I can find, self-voting is actually not much of a problem at all. Maybe the evidence below isn't sufficient or it's wrong, but according to @steem-data self-voting accounts for 6.4% of all votes. This strikes me as an incredibly weak justification. Then again, @steemitblog doesn't provide any data to suggest this is a problem serious enough to reduce the rewards to the engine that drives the platform, its authors.
From what the article suggests, their idea of a new rewards curve might help, but you don't need to reduce author rewards to make that work.
As an aside, I want to be frank about how I feel Curators being placed on par with creators. There's this image that's put forward that Curators are like digital Indiana Jones, scouring the dangerous jungle of shit content to find the Golden Idols of the Internet.
![](https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://media.giphy.com/media/oKVs1VY0MKfvO/giphy.gif)
But they're not! Curators - and I include myself in this category - are more like feckless nerds, warping their posture while staring at pixels. As curators, we're not a brave bunch of art critics! We read and click a thumbs up or down and maybe make a comment or share the article. Please, let's not overplay our efforts in this aspect of the system. Also, I don't know why - nor has there been any evidence presented - as to why this won't just increase the volume of shit on the network.
![](https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://media.giphy.com/media/llKJGxQ1ESmac/giphy.gif)
From Tim's article Hardfork 21 - Steem Proposal System (SPS) + Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP), his agreement with the proposal stems from the following justifications.
- Bid bots pretty much rule the platform.
- Very few stakeholders are spending time looking for quality contributions to reward.
- Many users who contribute a lot to the platform struggle to get any decent rewards.
- Little to no marketing is being done.
- Very few changes that users have been asking for are actually getting done.
- The STEEM price has fallen significantly from the all-time-high, and there is not much optimism for it going much higher than it is today. In fact, a lot of people are worried that it will just continue to go lower.
As sort of stated above, any claim that is made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. So claims 1 - 4 can be ignored in their entirety even if they're true.
I'm not saying I'd change my mind if they were, but if there was actual evidence presented here I'd be open to it. The evidence may exist for these justifications that are being leveraged to reduce author payout, but they're not here, so we're left with claims 5 & 6.
Is Claim 5 true? Anecdotally it seems true, but then again, I don't think it should be easy to change the network. I think it should be hard because it should be thoughtful, unlike the proposals here. I mean, maybe the reason so little gets done is because the proposals aren't good enough. Has it occurred to anyone that those in the top witness categories might not be fit to run the network and that their proposals are garbage? Just a thought.
Claim 6 is a bullshit justification because it's besides the point. The reasons for the price of Steem are as opaque to me as the code running system. We simply don't know why the price is as low as it is now, but I can tell you why it was much higher a year or so ago, irrational exuberance. It's a real term. It's when people start buying and buying and buying for fear of missing out on huge profits of whatever class of stock or commodity others are buying. Bitcoin experienced it with its $20,000 spike and so did Steem. This justification is just a shitty sleight of hand to make you think the price is related to the rewards system. The truth is we don't know why and Tim doesn't present any evidence that these price changes are related.
PRINCIPLES
There simply aren't any principles at play here in this proposed reduction in author rewards. I'd go so far as to say that it is unprincipled in the extreme. When someone does the work, in principle, who should get paid? Should it be the painter or the person admiring the painting? The author or the reader? The filmmaker or the critic?
In principle the creators of the work should be the ones getting paid out of these arrangements, but a reduction in payout on the Steem network to a 50/50 split seems to suggest that the viewer of the painting or the reader of the book somehow deserves equal, compensatory footing with the creator. Or that as a class they do. Maybe I'm way off base here, but in principle the creator should get all the compensation save what little is required to run museum or distribute the film or publish a book. The people in each of these cases are working to further the work and have actual overhead costs, training and other intangibles like institutional reputation. Reading and liking and re-steeming a work on Steem is not equivalent in any stretch of imagination.
It only gets close with efforts like @sndbox or @curie, but even then a 50/50 split is an offense to the senses and reason. Even Amazon, a virtual monopoly when it comes to digital book sales, will give the author the option to take 70% of the profits, even though I'm sure there are many asterisks to this deal.
I sometimes spend hours creating content. Researching, writing, proofreading, image creation, video editing, et al. A curator is a much more passive participant. They MIGHT spend only a few minutes reading said content and that somehow entitles them to 50% of the rewards?! No! Absolutely not. I cannot agree to this. I dedicate a lot of time to enhancing the network with good and thoughtful content and this new split proposal makes me viscerally angry.
This is outrageously unfair and this is guaranteed to act as a disincentive towards creation! Creators do the content heavy lifting!
If you want to decrease self-voting, then punish self-voting. If you want to get investors, create better and easier to use software. Go and innovate. If you want to decrease bid-bots, then come up with a solution that does that, but DO NOT think that just because someone reads our work, comments and re-steems entitles them to half our reward. It will not make the network better, it will make the network worse.
It will make it worse be making the rewards inherently unfair. Curators as a class have not earned the privilege of that much reward. This is not a share and share alike platform or world. I've earned my place on the network. I've invested a lot of time and actual capital into it and if you take 25% of my rewards away to fix problems that aren't even that big I will be inclined to stop creating.
THE BIGGEST STEEM NETWORK PROBLEM
The biggest problem the network has is not the rewards system.
It is... EASE OF USE!
EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON... That is to say...
100%
...of everyone I've ever gotten to sign up became frustrated because of confusion and an inappropriate amount of Steem Power for interactions on the network. They don't like that they can't vote a lot during their first day or two. It frustrates their efforts to explore the network and they GIVE UP. Facebook and the other horrible networks got one thing right. EASE OF USE! They're so easy a literal moron could use them.
If you gift newbies more, INITIAL Steem Power, they will be able to participate more, earlier. Passive interactions with the Steem Network need to be made more effortless for Curators, not more profitable!
Good grief.
![](https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://media.giphy.com/media/XozypzpGakVuX2ciZJ/giphy.gif)
In any case, for these reasons, and others, everyone proposing to lessen the creator's rewards on the platform can shove it up their collective ass.
Phil
I'm including you all in the comments for my post because I firmly believe the move to a 50/50 rewards split is extremely unfair to Creators on the platform. Please do not implement Hardfork 21 if this aspect is still included in the package!
@therealwolf @yabapmatt @blocktrades @gtg @someguy123 @roelandp @themarkymark @aggroed @cervantes @good-karma @thecryptodrive @ocd-witness @anyx @ausbitbank @smooth.witness @lukestokes.mhth @followbtcnews @clayop @drakos
Noone will care.
Take your cynicism elsewhere.
You'll see.
Looks like you were right. The ratio of hate the 50/50 is getting is massive and everyone is just marching forward. No sense of doubt it seems.
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I've been here since the very beginning. :) I've seen it all before.
Increasing the incentive to hold Steempower by improving what people make via curation aka their staked Steem? Genius!
Are you being sarcastic? I'm genuinely pissed off about this because I care about this platform and the authors that keep creating original content on here DESPITE its negative aspects.
I write a reasonable and detailed argument with citations about how the top 20 witnesses are planning to dramatically cut my rewards as an author and when I plead with you to NOT do it, I get back this nugget
Are you serious?! Do you have anything meaningful to add here?
https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/50-50-fair-and-for-us
https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/steem-2020-reducing-inflation-to-less-than-2
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@therealwolf/security-prosperity-and-innovation-for-steem
This is going to be fun.
EIP is aimed for:
This change is to empower creators of valuable content by encouraging SP holders to vote for them instead of selling VP or self-voting.
Additional note. Selling VP to bid bots is actually form of self vote, but in stealth mode. In the end, one chose not to vote for content you value, instead chose to get $$ from the bid bot. Effect is exactly same.
Do you have any actual evidence that reducing creator rewards is going to accomplish anything this proposal claims to do? Any Testing that we can look over? I haven’t seen any data. Any economic theories you can cite to justify this change? I haven’t seen one presented. Any scientific polling done at large to see if the community was okay with this change? Any market studies?
I’m just expected to take this halving of rewards because of... self voting?
You are aiming at a moving target blindly. I keep seeing these assertions without evidence. All these claims of how it will benefit the community all the while shrugging off substantive complaints like mine.
I have real questions that look like they can’t be answered by Tim or you or Wolf or MarkyMark. Why are any of you worthy of changing the rules so substantially when I can’t see a coherent justification for them, especially the rewards change. I get the rewards curve change, but cutting the creator’s reward this dramatically requires a justification I haven’t seen yet.
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There have been numerous @steemitblog posts and resteems about EIP and its various components including rewards curves and downvoting. They further reference other posts and discussions which go back years and dig into further aspects of the economic theory behind it.
If you are writing as an investor/stakeholder then no you don't have to take it, you have a vote on the matter.
If you are writing as a poster, then yes, it is true you have no say. Investors pay you some of their money via inflation because they believe it helps accomplish a goal. If they don't view the goal as one that is successfully being accomplished (and many do not), then adjustments can and will be made.
Nevertheless if EIP goes into effect then: 1) As a poster there will certainly still be money paid to you by investors, and 2) It is far from clear to me how the various adjustments will play out in terms of the amount of money going to good posters and content relative to now, when a large portion of the pool is being milked out and not going to good posters and content.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH. These discussions need to be accessible in one place and held at regular intervals. I read a lot of the posts and comments over the last few days. This process is scattered and confusing. It's garbage.
Not every curator can make more money than a self vote. Even in a system with 50/50, the people who vote in the end WILL get less steem than those who vote at the beginning. 50/50 will not make more people want to vote on others, since they still have a chance of getting nothing.
Instead, more people need to think of voting as donating, you need to be okay with losing the possible curation rewards you could have gotten to donate to the author. Some people can be curators and just browse NEW and curate, but everyone else should see their votes as donations, because that's what they end up as anyway.
Yes
True but not so relevant. Under a 50/50 system the average curator makes half as a much as self voting.
This is why downvotes are needed to help close the gap further. If you self-vote in an abusive manner, yes you may get 2x compared to curating, but you may also get downvoted and earn nothing. The added risk means you may be better of curating.
That plus perhaps at least some people would rather do the right thing. Maybe they aren't willing to give up a huge profit when the difference between self-voting and curating is 4x and there is almost now downvoting (as is the case today), but perhaps they would be willing to do the right thing if the difference is only 2x and from there downvoting is a real risk. Ultimately we'll see.
Unlikely to happen, if it was going to happen it would have by now and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Well maybe Steem Inc. automatically selling around 400k Steem per week on the exchanges has something to do with it? Who would invest in Steem, knowing that Steemit Inc. is constantly pushing the price down?
I do agree with the general sentiment of the post. Why reward someone with just 50% when they've spend hours writing a post in some cases? Idk, just seems massively unfair to me.
Edit: Woops, got the numbers wrong, it's 200k per week. (Thanks Smooth)
It's 200k per week
It's true that would have an effect, though I'm not sure how much.
Thanks for having a read and I'm glad you agree. I'm beginning to think that the top 20 witnesses need to be voted out ASAP if we're to stop the whole system being geared towards "investors", i.e. themselves, instead of who the platform was supposed to foster, creators.
Please consider resteeming my post. I normally wouldn't come outright and beg for a resteem, but I really feel this is an important story that needs to be shared.
Nice post and well written. I understand little about the mechanics behind the scenes so hold back my opinion, not that my opinion would make much difference to the outcome anyway. What I do know is that there are certain curators giving away large upvotes to very undesirable characters and my guess is that they are doing this because of the high profiles these @'s have in the mainstream. It's a bit of a kick in the bollocks when you're someone like me who spends lots of hours creating posts for little reward or recognition.
It's also a shame that your post hasn't been met with more of a constructive argument. Like I said, I understand little about the mechanics and watching these debates unfold can be helpful but alot of the time folks just get over defensive or unduly offended.
Thank you for taking the time to read it. I know there are abusers on the system, but now those tasked with maintaining the system look like they're abusing the system as well using weak justifications to cut Creator rewards in half. I'm not an expert in the mechanics either, but I have a decent understanding of incentives and the principles at stake. I've been doing a lot more reading into the "discussions" that have been happening between witness and stakeholders, but it's all been behind the scenes. Not an ounce of substantive public outreach or engagement with creators. It's a real shame.
From what you say about things being done behind the scenes it sounds a lot like the last hf, shame if it is the case. From the limited info I have it sounds as if those making changes want more investment to raise the price(no probs with that) I just don't understand how reducing author payouts and passing it to curators is a game changer. I would have thought there were better ways, preferably without upsetting/targeting a large portion of your own community. I have to agree with another comment you received about steemit.inc selling vast amounts of steem on a regular basis, That's like trying to build a house while selling your bricks...
These Top 20 aren’t fit for the job. They do all the debating in discord channels and in places that aren’t public facing, don’t cite evidence for their claims and don’t conduct any scientific polling to see if what they’re proposing is what users actually want.
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Completely agree that the biggest problem is ease of use. Can’t find quality content that I like, or “recommended” to them like YT does. I’m cornered into a small space in steemit and continue to support just a small handful of accounts I happened to stumble upon a while ago.
Very well said my esteemed @distantsignal. :)
I totally agree with you on this mate. And certainly I also dropped my fair bit of opinions everywhere about this balderdash matters.
Yeah! "Curators" c-u-r-e=i=t=o=r=s...
Ha, I even also have written a 'bilingual' post about my views on "Avid Curators" a month ago. And just to complement that last .gif in your article here, let's just add one more eloquent Pic to the EIP pot.
Btw, upvoted & resteemed this post my friend. :)
Ha! Thank you! I love that image. If only I could make my feet actually do that.
Just with practice mate. }:)
Everything with practice 'should' be achievable. LoL
BTW. The level of support for this is bit surprising and not. Who could imagine that a proposal offering more money to people who LITERALLY DO LESS than creators would be popular. It’s so weird!
Sarcasm Beam is set to kill here.
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Do you feel creating a post a day is doing more than investing 1 Million dollars to power up and support content on the platform?
Hi Apples, meet Oranges.
My individual posts? No.
However, the collective effort of all the creators is worth more than this hypothetical $1 million. Way more.
What good is said money without the content? It isn't, so please don't come asking this skewed, hypothetical question as though an investor is inherently worth more than the creator. I get this kind of crap all the time in the entertainment industry. I often hear, "well, he's the guy with the money." So what? The money is a useless tool without the idea and without the team to execute it.
The platform was created to put creators first. It's the number one reason I joined and pushed it.
And while I only have 4,000+ SP, that too makes ME an investor. I have a stake as both an investor AND a creator but I don't think my 4,000 SP makes me profoundly more valuable or more deserving of income. On that topic, as someone who has a lot of SP, you are more than capable of making good, passive income with that. Justify to me why you need more. Why is it as a creator I have to justify why I deserve the majority of rewards on a platform that was created to do just that.
Oh! lazy people outnumber us tenfold!!
And if it happens, that they also have some stake in the unfair game. Multiply that laziness tenfold more.
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://i1.wp.com/www.sopitas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/funny-lazy-people-11__605.jpg)
So, they know it better!! Tsk Tsk };)
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Hi @distantsignal, I happen to be one of the few that agree with you. 50/50 sounds good on paper, but do whales really have the time to sift through posts and curate them? I'm sceptical of whether that will happen in practice, 50/50 is also perceptually problematic, prima facie it looks like the author is earning the same for less effort, the UI's don't show that actually the curation part is shared by many and the author gets the biggest share.
Right now discussions are fragmented on the HF21 topic, I invite you to start collating all discussions in one place that is easily discoverable, we have created the HF21 Category on the neosteem.com forum for this.
Good evening @thecryptodrive. Thank you for reaching out to me. I know my diatribe comes off as harsh, but I'm catching up to everything just now and realized that I have a serious problem with this whole thing and the attitudes from some of the other witnesses has me concerned.
When I read through the justifications for these omnibus changes, I am not convinced that the reasons given are sufficient for making them all at once or at all. Nobody is focusing on making Steem easier, the singular reason all my friends have left the platform. It's just not fun for anyone outside of someone like myself who is very much into Crypto and a risk taker. Most people just want to have fun. When are we going to make Steem more fun for the average person?
Some time ago I was creating my own social network, which I'm going to write about in more detail in my next post on this matter. We had a 96 page business plan demonstrating every aspect of the platform. From the UI to the economics, we had to justify everything to the venture capitalists and heads of corporations we were meeting. Now, the plan wasn't a success, but the amount of detail provided a level of clarity I've never achieved in a proposal before or since. We even conducted a nation wide poll to determine our market and audience.
Now maybe the 50/50 split will in fact be better for the Creator, but what I want if we're going to be trusting witnesses to make these huge economic changes to the network is a degree of clarity that borders on crystal. I want concerted outreach on Reddit and Twitter and YouTube, scientific polling, off-chain testing if possible or simulations showing the predictions in practice, incrementalism and a real dialogue. The comments section isn't enough. The Witness statements aren't enough for me. The Witnesses have a massive responsibility to us the Creators and to the users who just want to enjoy the platform, but I'm not getting the sense that they have any doubts or humility about their position... save for you.
There just isn't that much of a formal process that Witnesses have to go through to earn our trust. I've only given my vote to 3 witnesses because I believe they've earned my trust and none of them are in the Top 20. Maybe you'll be the first. :)
I'll have a look at Neosteem.
Thanks for your time and have a fine evening.
Hi @distantsignal, yes please engage on neosteem.com and add your thoughts on the HF21 changes, the problem is the community currently has a fragmented voice, posts like yours pop up everywhere and then are no longer discoverable. If we can collate discussion in one place we can truely see who is onboard with the changes and who is not.
Also such changes can't really be tested in a testnet because users won't behave with fake money as they would with real money, so you kind of have to just launch and iterate from there. Luckily the rewards split can be reversed back if it really sucks, but then we would be playing catch-up getting users back. It would be good if the rewards splits were controlled by witness parameter or by SPS proposal consensus so it doesn't require a HF every time and upset exchanges.
Oh I just remembered https://palnet.io have launched a frontend that has PAL tokens which have the 50/50 distribution and a 4 week powerdown as well as a free downvote pool, so theoretically you can test the theory there.
I hear you on the complexity of Steem and end users have lives and families and no time to dig deep into complex mechanics, it needs to be easy. We are trying to do that with neosteem.com and create a nice easy way for communities to interact and ensure discussion and evergreen and discoverable, one cool thing we will do is make it possible for topic creators to earn part of the beneficiary rewards so that they are incentivised to keep the discussion flowing on their topic.
We should have this by next week. The neosteem token has also been reserved on Steem-Engine to give out as a supplementary engagement token, but we haven't enabled that yet as we would like to give some thought to the tokenomics
I am interested in the 96 page business plan you did, I often pitch Steem to exchanges and payment integrators and could be of use. Feel free to DM me on Discord thecryptodrive#8144 with the draft.
Have a good evening as well.
Good morning,
I think you've hit the nail on the head with Palnet. As an experiment we should let people migrate there and run that experiment with that specific reward structure and then report on the results. If positive, then make the changes here. Will continue my thoughts on Neosteem. Thanks!