The Hive blockchain users make it bad
The code practically forces them to. People naturally have a prudential responsibility to manage their wealth, and curation rewards being coded in make managing their curation rewards a sacred duty. Failing to maximize their curation rewards can even be considered a sin by certain interpretations of scripture.
The problem is the curation rewards. People naturally engaging with content out of interest are very willing to upvote good content, as your examples of interactions on other platforms demonstrates. Curation rewards aren't necessary to incentivize people to upvote good content. What curation rewards are necessary to do on Hive is allow stake to be rewarded, for investment to receive ROI. Prior to HBD savings accounts, besides the ~3% staked Hive holders receive of inflation, curation rewards were the mechanism created for investors to gain a return on their investment in Hive.
You don't need to invest any money to gain author rewards, but curation rewards specifically depend on the amount of stake you hold.
Curation rewards are, in fact, the problem.
Then why not make it a flat ROI for all active curators, regardless of how they use their voting power, so long as they use it for something? Also remove the dust rule?
@edicted long ago suggested that savings accounts with nominal interest could provide better ROI for investors without perverting curation with financialization, and I have strongly supported that idea, and still do. While HBD savings accounts with 20% interest (now reduced to 15%) advented, curation rewards remained potential and this allowed the financialization to continue to pervert curation.
There simply isn't any need for curation rewards. Myriad social media platforms enable folks to upvote content for subjective reasons, which is the definition of curation, and without receiving financial incentives for doing so. There is no lack of curation on any such platform. People have other values besides money that cause them to curate content, and in fact these values are far more valuable than mere money. Mike Tyson said that Don King (his manager) would sell his mother for a dollar, and curation rewards are perfect for the Don Kings of the world, but unnecessary for anyone that loves their mother more than a dollar - or any other societal value, like truth, justice, or apple pie.
Curation rewards are not only unnecessary, they are utterly contradictory to functional social media platforms, and Steem and Hive have well demonstrated why this is so.
Edit: also, the dust rule is simply economic reality. Transactions on the network have costs, and when they are below the cost of transmitting them, storing them, and etc., doing so drains the network of necessary resources. The dust rule isn't a conspiracy to cheat the poor, but is necessary to prevent spam and infinitesimally tiny transactions that have the same costs as ~$1M transactions from bleeding the network of resources.
I agree that "curation" has no practical value in theory, but it does seem to have a very legitimate psychological value. In fact before we even have this conversation I'd have to point out that calling it "curation" is a farce, as upvoting content doesn't curate anything and it is the frontends of Hive that curate all the content seen by almost all users.
The psychological value of curation is that it does seem limit greed a little bit by making giving money away a pill that becomes a little bit easier to swallow. I call it a "kickback" instead of "curation" because that's what it is after the changes we've made over the years. At this point it's a flat 50/50 partnership between ourselves and the person being allocated inflation.
We can try to make an argument that this is wasted inflation... but that would be a lie unless you believe we shouldn't be diluting stake that isn't powered up. Seeing as most stake not powered up sits on exchanges and acts as an existential threat to the network it would be foolish not to dilute it with inflation emissions like "curation". We don't want centralized agents with massive amounts of stake to have even more power.
I completely agree, except that curation rewards are both unnecessary and counterproductive to that dilution. They are counterproductive because they reward stake, which author rewards do not, and so act to concentrate stake. It is author rewards that best distribute stake, create resilience to hostile takeovers, and best leverage social media in that market.
All sorts of creators are trying to flee 2gen social media that is centralized, censored, and vulnerable to oppressive government. Decentralization is the critical 3gen advantage that can break that deathgrip governments are increasingly choking society to death with, as Twatter and Telegram demonstrate by capitulating to government oppression they cannot resist because they are centralized. Serve the market for free speech and Hive will moon, and that will better financially reward whales than maintaining their deathgrip on Hive governance through unrestrained taxation, curation rewards, and plutocratic control of the witnesses. It will also enable global resistance to increasing government oppression, and that is existentially more valuable than money, as history well reveals.
Unfortunately this is just the theory and not the actual reality.
Just like most people live paycheck to paycheck, so do most earners sell all their rewards right back to the big stake holders that gave them the reward in the first place.
This isn't even the theory.
It's just mathematically incorrect and you keep saying it.
Again, only non-powered up tokens are being diluted.
If I own 1% of the network and I earn 10% yield, I do not suddenly own more than 1% of the network.
The other accounts that only own 0.1% continue to own 0.1% after earning their 10% yield.
Truly I do not understand why people on Hive insist on making this mistake even after being corrected.
Tricks with maths don't alter the reality that author rewards go to folks independent of stake and curation rewards are functions of stake. The reality is that curation rewards are ROI for investors, were conceived of as ROI. Author rewards distribute stake. Whether the authors keep it or sell it is a different matter. Curators can - and do - pay attention to what authors do with their stake, and that affects curation.
I don't think you realize how many accounts would inherently become bad actors without the 50% kickback.
Like I said the psychological benefit alone is more than worth it.
Do you know how easy it would be these days to just create a couple dozen fake accounts and Sybil attack the network by 100% upvoting AI generated content? I guarantee you some curators do this shit already but it would be exponentially more without the curation mechanic.
And then it becomes just like steroids in professional sports where literally everyone is forced to break the rules in order to compete because "everyone is doing it". In many regards this is a huge problem with macro-capitalism as well. Curation largely fixes this problem, which is surprising but it does. We can see that it does.
That's exactly how it works already as long as you vote within 24 hours.
I agree this is a dumb compromise and a bastardized version of how it should be.
At the same time it's also a reminder of our history of economic policy.
I thought it was also based on how much a post earns, and how many people vote on it?
Hopefully one day those reminders will fade, we can always rely on stories for reminders :) ....
!PIZZA
It is. The higher the author rewards on a post, the higher curation rewards are.
I think the dust rule is mainly in effect if a post/comment is 50/50 hbd/hp, I'm talking to @peakd to see if comments could automatically be set to use 100% power up to give curators and authors a chance to earn even .001 hp if that means the dust threshold can be bypassed in that case. Still checking on the latter.
It would definitely add up in the long run, especially now that we have Inleo and Waves