RE: Change Curation Reward System On Steem Blockchain / DISCUSSION
I will say that I disagree with the notion that an incentive to early voting should be removed. I think the system now encourages people to try to be the first to find quality content. In a system where everyone receives an equal share, bots will be programmed instead to find articles with a large ratio from payout to voters. This means that people will wait to vote until the last possible minute (so the amount of voters won't change), and they will not look for quality content, but instead look for a big ROI. This may be good for the short term price of Steem, but in the long term it would not be sustainable (KSS - Keep it Sustainable Silly), and would frustrate authors.
I agree with @remlaps about professional economic analysis being a good idea. These are complex systems, and they should not be changed without a professional analysis of what the changes will do. That being said, I also don't know if this should be a priority right now. We should focus on growing the number of users through marketing, and improving the user experience before changing the complex technological systems that are essential to Steem.
I do not fully agree that the system now encourages people to vote for quality. It encourages to vote early, that is the only certainty.
I might have explained it wrong. But what I like is this: I have 20000 SP, my vote is worth a dollar. 50cent goes to the author I vote for, the other half straight to me when the payout occurs. No matter if I voted first or last. It is always 50% of my vote. With this system, there are no incentives to vote early or on high earners just to get a higher share of the pie. You do not earn less then 50% of your own vote, but also not more.
Yes, it should be looked at by economists. I am just creating awareness and want to let people know that we want to improve.
I am with you on the marketing and brining new users in, all about it actually. I also just do not want to ignore the fact 1 million users signed up, and we got about 1k left. There must be something that we can do to improve that 0.1% retention rate.
Hmmm.
So what you are suggesting means your curation reward could be made independent of popularity of the post, as there would be no advantage in voting for popular posts, but also no disadvantage to voting on unpopular posts. This would possibly remove the incentive to vote on Quality as your reward would not change. However, looking at it another way, it could encourage you to vote on quality posts. It would certainly be simpler perhaps to explain then our current system. I would need to think this over and I would be curious what others think about this simplicity.
#steemconnection
The current system encourages users to vote early on the articles they think will have the biggest curation rewards. One of the main factors that can be used to predict which articles will return the most is the quality of the article (there are other factors, but quality is taken into consideration by a lot of stake holders).
In a system where everyone gets 50 percent of their vote, large stakeholders have no incentive to think about why or how they are voting since the return is the same no matter how they vote. This means they will not vote based on quality. In addition, this will make curation unfair for small stakeholders. In the current system, if the smaller users vote before large stakeholders, they will likely get a larger percentage of their vote back than 50 percent. If a set curation rate of 50 percent is utilized, there will be no incentive for good curation for either group.
I don't think a lot of them left because the curation rewards system was unfair. I will say 1 million accounts != 1 million users. Most of the users probably left because the price went down, or left with the Hive crew. Some may have left indirectly because of the curation system, but this idea will not fix the curation system in any way. It will amplify the problems.
Thanks for the response.
You absolutely raise some valid points. At the moment, curation is also done based on the expectation of a high payout and likely established users or users that have a proven consistent payout benefit from this. Probably because they have a good quality post. The only fact is that this model is clearly not working as it is anticipated.
A flatter curve will not solve all the problems, but as I see it will definitely improve the distribution.
The thing is, we do not have to think like investors, or primarily for investors. We need to think about mass adoption so think about what is good for actually 95% of the people. We need a massive amount of users, so think what is best for them, investors will follow the money, and that is mostly where all the users are.
How I see the recruiting and retaining process:
Thanks again, I really like these discussions