Curation rewards, especially for small new accounts, represented a preoccupation of mine for some time. I tested them, commented and posted as well.
This is an experiment I held at some point on my test account. I didn't continue the experiment with the delegated SP as I announced at the end of the post, because I needed that SP at the time for a different purpose.
Listening to @ned's presentation at @GOPAX Meetup in Korea, I realized that, besides the obvious theme of Smart Media Tokens, updates in the way curation rewards will be distributed are being considered or developed as well. If you want to listen to Ned's talk, would have to check through this entire recording of the event, most of it being in Korean:
Looking deeper, I found a development update on the Steemit blog, four months old, announcing what will be the directions of the "Velocity" Hardfork 20. Since I'm only on Steemit for 3 months, makes sense I didn't know about it by now.
If you want the layman abstract, here's what the Velocity hardfork proposes referring to curation:
1. changing the full curation reward time-window from 30 to 15 minutes
This time-window was introduce to combat bots which were upvoting popular authors immediately after the post was published, thus depriving human curators of their rewards.
Personally, I don't see how this change from 30 to 15 minutes would make much of a difference (perhaps because the rate of decay would be double every minute, with a 15 minute window?).
2. eliminating self-voting rewards through curation
What does that mean?
If authors vote for themselves right away, they get their author rewards, 100% of the curation rewards from their vote, plus a portion of the curation rewards coming from everyone who votes for the post after them. Any other curator voting at the same time as the author would get 0% of the curation rewards. This gives the author an unfair advantage over other curators because the author can earn additional curation rewards through self-voting.
That seems fair to me, the author already gets the 75% author rewards, playing tricks to increase curation rewards as well is plain greed.
The phrase I found disheartening though was this:
There is no official release date yet, but a release candidate is expected to be ready by the end of the year.
Does that mean Hardfork 20 will not be launched until the end of 2018?
Yeah, the end of the year is disheartening, but in a different way: that post was written on 20 December 2017.
Hmm, we can only find reasons to hope for a sooner update, don't we? :) Thanks for your comment!