RE: Something Useful For Blockchain
Yes, I also think that Steemit employs such paid curators. But maybe they are not only responsible for curating and could be entrusted with other tasks (besides holidays) for a while. I think that is already the case, because curating is already taken away from them quite a lot by the suggestions of sc03-sc09. I also worked in one of these teams for three months. It was very exhausting and it takes quite a lot of idealism, because no one would work for the "hourly wage" (in our western world). I hope that Steemit Inc. pays its "real" employees better... ;-)
Perhaps there would be more bot and delegation users (only those who can afford it, of course). But since Steemit doesn't really want that, this was part of its monitoring task: anyone who overshoots is not community-supportive, gets put on a list (ah, the "idle" employees could create this during their break...) and also has to expect no attention from the Steemit team in the future (after the break)... ;-)
Also, as the largest stakeholder, I think Steemit really ought to maintain some discretion over what gets rewarded.
Yes, of course. As in any other case, that would be: Exceptions prove the rule. This would then be a surprise for "the lucky user" - and Steemit could be sure that it would hit a committed user who is willing to produce good content independent of rewards.
some sort of long term incentive structure that links their curators' bonuses to the level and types of blockchain activity and also the future price of STEEM
Good idea. A break like this is perfect to think about this in detail and then publish a consistent "set of rules" and the roadmap that has been called for so often in a transparent way.
of course, for all I know, they may already have such a program
This programme definitely exists in rudimentary form. Too often, however, the Steemit team does not adhere to its own guidelines when voting, which it "demands" of the curatorial teams. Sometimes you think, "OK, they want to use up their votes, because nobody would had read that sh..." I can relate to that: Nobody can read everything. Well-paid curators should, though - or the thesis of people hired specifically for curating is disproven.... ;-)
I would also start burning 100% of rewards from the steemitblog posts. ;-)
Word... ;-)
Well, I actually also think that the proposed "absolute voting pause" is rather utopian.
But a step in the right direction might be the following: The Steemit team votes after five days at the earliest. If by then hardly any private curators have taken care of the post in question and there are no comments on the content, it could be that the article is crap or the author is shunned by the community because of other "offences". That could be checked.
I think this is worth considering for another reason, too. High-value curators could use curation rewards to train smaller curators about what to look for. In the past, I have even thought that whales could (maybe) make Steem more valuable to investors by announcing a certain percentage of their votes a day or two ahead of time and intentionally letting the smaller voters "pile on" to collect the curation rewards. Yeah, the whale would lose curation rewards, but hopefully that would be balanced by an increase in the value of their holdings, since it would encourage investment (or at least, HODLing).
So there's a feedback loop there. The whale learns from the smaller curators and the smaller curators also learn from the whale.
This would be a very "social" aspect for manual operation.
Unfortunately, the reality is different: upvu, for example, votes after exactly five minutes and leaves smaller "curation calculators" no chance at all. Then, of course, there are the smart users who sit directly in front of the whale via autovoter.
But fortunately we are not talking about Upvu and all those who take advantage of this "service"... ;-)
I would be very happy to perceive this feedback loop at some point.
However, that would bring us back to the beginning: for that to happen, many, many more users would have to recognise themselves as curators.
This - and also the new comments by o1eh - give me further ideas: Have you ever thought through what it would be like to increase the CR share to 75%? Curating would be more lucrative, not every user would constantly produce something (which nobody is interested in anyway) "at any price". Unfortunately, upvu and the bots would profit greatly from this, but it would also be a chance to balance the imbalance between readers (curators) and producers (including spammers, scammers, etc.).
Your opinion is important to me! Maybe we can manage to sort out our thoughts (pros/cons) and find an attentive reader in the Steemit team. Many good thoughts have already emerged and been reflected here - they should not be lost.
I have thought about it. I would support it because I agree with your reasoning and I think it would be better for authors, curators, and investors; but I think the impact would be modest. Also, there was HUGE opposition when they switched from 25% to 50% for curators. I'm sure that switching to 75% would be extremely controversial.
IMO, the biggest problem with rewards is not the percentage, but rather that there's no incentive for the curator to self-regulate their vote size. Downvotes were supposed to let others act as regulators, but that didn't work out.
So I have long thought that the most effective thing that could be done would be to take the rewards from the voter with the highest rshares on a post at payout time and throw them back into the rewards pool. This would create an incentive for voters to compete to be the second-highest voter. High value votes from a single account that are wildly different than the consensus would be automatically zeroed out and redistributed to other posts. So... in theory... the voter would want to try to guess what the highest value vote would be at payout time and place their own vote just below that value.
Someone could game this scheme by splitting their stake into multiple accounts, but there is a natural penalty built in if they do that, and the capability still exists to regulate those "cheaters" with downvotes.
Another thing I have thought about is to let authors set the curation percentage at posting time. New authors trying to build an audience could gain visibility by setting curation rewards higher. Established authors could set them lower.
Interestingly, the @null beneficiary creates a sort of a backdoor into this, so we already have it in an ad-hoc kind of way. But that brings the conversation full-circle back to needing web site changes to make the posts easy to find. ; -)
That is also a very interesting approach, which I - I think - already read about in your blog a long time ago, but hadn't quite understood how you meant it. Now I can understand this idea very well, thank you.
In general, I would like to thank you for this very interesting dialogue!