RE: Reflections on the Benefits and Growing Pains of Project Curie, Steem Guild, and Other Curation Projects on Steemit
The daily rewards are an issue to me as well, and it was one reason I wrote this post. I see this as a temporary band-aid and I think the formalized voting guilds will allow for better models, but for the meantime, the work these projects are doing is too important not to support. I'm definitely in agreement with you that we should continue experimenting (and listening and being open to other ideas). There is no top-down decision-making or magic # to the $30 rewards; the team members have come up with that rewards range as a group, but we are not wedded to it at all. In fact, we have been adjusting these at various points and are quite open to community feedback about what works best. If a better model were to emerge, I can't tell you how happy I would be to stand aside. :)
Hi Donkeypong.
About the daily post you made with curie. why not just post it on a external site or use the 0% reward option?
That daily post could fund another 25 authors, instead of the curie account.
His point is that the rewards from that post are needed to pay the costs of operating Curie in its present form. Otherwise he could just post an update and summary less frequently (say weekly) as another option.
Tough decisions may need to be made though (I think noted in the post). The reward pool is shrinking and that is a significant slice being drained from it.
Maybe top-down is not exactly the right way to describe it, but the point is that it is institutionalized and such institutions must have a degree of inertia to sanely function as an organization. Curie has a mission statement (an informal one at least). That's not to say it can't evolve, but people join knowing that mission (and likely supporting it or they wouldn't join), so it becomes self-reinforcing.
Individual voters who haven't institutionalized their decision making can and do more easily shift direction on a whim, as quickly as today's hottest pop star can be tomorrow's has-been. Steemsports is a great example of something that likely wouldn't have been popular or fit the mold of what voters were looking for a few month ago, but it successful now.
I started a curation guild to discover unrecognized posts and authors (and still have an individual dedicated curator doing that for me) but now I'm recognizing more value in people having at least the possibility of a critical mass of success and earnings in some (not all) cases that call for more focused voting. In some ways the smaller reward pool makes this even stronger as the amounts of very-widely-distributed rewards become increasingly meaningless (better to give at least meaningful rewards to a few, I think). So the pendulum swings on these things.