As an active curator that most of the time strives to vote on content I know will probably not see many votes after mine due to it being new users, etc. I have thought about this for a long time which changes would help out to incentivize curation more for all accounts involved.
Even though curation has a much bigger inventive here than say on other platforms such as Reddit it can still be finetuned more and I hope it will become better over time and experiments.
The curation penalty for voting early should be changed somewhat. I know this was put in place because of bots voting on the same second a post was released by authors they knew will gather a lot of votes but this was also done at a time when people were already using bots for their 40 daily votes. Now with only 10 daily votes and a bigger inventive to vote manually this could incentivize curators to check through the 'new' section more often in hopes of finding the gems that people don't already have on automatic bots.
Combined with that I think we need to rething the curve of rewarding curation where the first voters receive a much bigger piece of the pie than those voting last. I've noticed that often even if you are the last to vote you still make a decent amount of curation rewards if your stake is big, this would at the same time discourage curators from voting on friends and the popular authors if they notice it has already garnered big amount of rewards and they might consider voting on something newer or with less rewards instead.
At the same time, increasing the curation reward pool and decreasing the post reward one would activate more authors to start voting.
There are a lot of things that can still be improved on and experimented with and I'm sure we will be able to find a better balance over time.
I also noticed the lack of mention of delegation in your post, having read a post of @benjojo recently I have to admit that its like a superpower and in the right hands it will make curation even more effective on the platform.
I am for instance delegating my own SP further to the curators of @ocd and we are looking to growing over time in amount of curators and delegation with the platform and its userbase to make sure that less and less quality and new authors get overlooked.
Steem has a lot of incentives and even though not all of them are being used to their max extent yet I believe it will get better and better over time.
Sorry for possible typos, wrote this on my phone with a Swedish keyboard. :P
I agree with most of the points you made. In my opinion the real problem is with the content discovery. Since whales already have enough followers their posts generally gets upvoted if the content is good. The problem is with the content discovery for the new authors. Not many people are ready to spend time reading the posts of their friends and followers. They are constantly looking at the posts by whales so that they can upvote them in the hope of getting some curation rewards.
So we will need to turn the tables around give more rewards for the discovery of content by authors whose average earnings are low. Since whales with large number of followers already get enough votes and rewards, the curation rewards for discovering their content should be reduce. Adding curation rewards for resteeming can solve this problem to a certain extent. Remember that an upvote doesn't increase the visibility of a post, it only increases the rewards for the author of the post but it doesn't help in making the post reachable to others. If possible we should identify who are having a network effect in making content more popular and reward them accordingly. That will create a level playing field. Irrespective of whether you are a whale or a minnows you will be in the lookout for the good content and resteem them to make sure that it gets the visibility it deserves. Wildspark is already doing this successfully and may be steemit can learn from it.
If we don't address this problem Steemit will turn out to be like the Ghost cities of China where there are lot of high-end skyscrapers that have no occupancy at all. Just that in steemit there will be lot of users writing posts but not enough people reading them even if they are worthy. I hope Steemit addresses this problem by the earliest :)
Nice input! I like the idea of curation rewards for resteems!
Monkey Nuts
I had no idea that posts were not made more visible by upvoting them - I assumed that was part of the point of upvoting posts. I think most newbies to the site such as myself will assume it is a 'reddit' sort of situation where highly upvoted posts are more visible. Are the 'hot' and 'trending' posts not there based on upvotes, then?
I'm fairly new and still trying to wrap my head around all of this. My only reference is youtube where a like equals profit and a like on facebook acknowledges that I read the content.
I've been trying to raise my reputation and only voting while at 90% or better and my votes are still worthless. My posts are only bringing in less than 10 cents. I know it will get better with time.
I assumed that by voting for content that I enjoyed, that my vote would somehow propel the writer forward. I'm just plain confused.
I was thinking the same @ashley-ghastley.
Please read my post at https://steemit.com/steemit/@pjprivett/little-known-or-noticed-2
It deals with voting as a newbie, I'd be interested in your comments!
I will say it is a little surprising to hear some of the things you mention, and thank you for making that post so we can all be aware - however I'm sure there are reasons behind why these things have to be how they are. Your post is a little overly inflammatory - as in, it tends to be a little along the lines of "THE SKY IS FALLING!" whereas I'm sure there's lots of reasons for why these things work the way they do - if every new user could be super effective as soon as they signed up, then creating fake accounts and botting would be way too lucrative, and it ALREADY IS lucrative in some ways from what I've seen.
Thus although I DO wish there was a much more comprehensive guide to how Steem works for new users, I think many of these things exist for good reason and although it's frustrating, most of this stuff seems to come in time and be for the better, in the end.
Excellent response. I agree with everything you say.
Yes I think it needs adjustment.
Yes in fact people have suggested this before.
I forgot about delegation - that is one way to help I suppose this creates the whale issue again though. If you have substantial voting power does that reduce the need to actively curate? I suppose we would need data to assess this in practice.
It might reduce it if you become lazy and because of the rewards not changing too much cause of the curve, yes.
Since we also have the problems with distribution (not too many having a bigger stake to actively consider curation a way of earning), and although it over time is getting a lot better (and with new investors and curators coming to the platform its being spread wide even more) it could become a lot better if the delegation is spread among more curators and with the change in curation curve in mind it would work wonders for curators actually being rewarded a lot more for being the first to stumble upon great new and undervalued content.
Would also be nice if delegation could have more options for reward allocation so that inactive investors and whales would not need to rely on the curators sharing the curation rewards with them but it being done automatically instead thus incentivizing them to delegate more actively and to more users.
Yes in fact I think it was a big mistake not having this built in. Delegators should get something in return even if it isn't a 50:50 split they should still get something, as they are basically making an investment.
They shouldn't just be expected to do it as a charity service.
Exactly, especially since it only takes 10 votes daily now so any greedy investor will just throw em out quickly without care if its going to the right place or being distributed nicely instead of handing them over to a good manual curator knowing its doing a lot more good for the long term of the platform while still seeing some rewards from them.
you and @thecryptofiend raised so many good points
the sad part is no one up there seem to have even read this post
A lot of these changes have been / are being discussed. I was really in support of the idea of a delegator receiving a portion of the curation rewards that were earned from the delegated SP. It was discussed with the dev team, and unfortunately the math/computation to make it work was too complex. Something like that could be formed 'off chain' though via some type of delegation market. It is still early in the game. Something along these lines is still a possibility.
Would "Fabric" be able to do this? I think it is really important in order to make delegation truly viable.
great comments, great discussion / as a relative newcomer I enjoy the idea of curation and do try, but there are virtually no rewards. I'm all for a better system, probably about early, non-bot votes getting rewarded, yes !!
I completely agree. The way things are now, curators might be scared off by the penalty, which means they wait a few minutes to upvote a post. By then, the post is so far down the feed, never to be seen again, that the author misses out on a lot of eyes on their post. That's because people are more eager to check out a post with some upvotes already in place (though reputation plays a big role there too).
I think that's a really good point. It might help people who don't earn a lot with their posts to re-think their strategy and start upvoting more. Actually, maybe it would even get rid of some crap posts in our feed, because these people will be upvoting, instead of posting... Or is that wishful thinking?
"wrote this on my phone"
you deserve hazard pay
How do i uses the rewards to further my chances of making a little more. Any tips? And thanks for the guides on stuff
:)
Thanks a lot for the info I'm still trying to figure out how this whole steem thing works and this was very helpful
Is anyone aware of any accounts that do a daily best of summary. I think these have the potential to become very popular accounts but I am concerned that there is not much of an incentive to do the work. Maybe there could be a bonus for how the post was viewed? Whether it was found via your blog? Ie the more quality traffic a curator is able to send to a post the more rewards they receive as a curator? That would encourage community building....but once again, bots would probably be deployed in droves.
How much adderall do you have to take to comment 1 pagers
lol on the phone even xD
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