There should be a way to reward posts older than 7 days, based on hits/views alone. Something similar to Youtube, since steemit searches on google is on the rise and attracting alot of hits on steemit content.
Authors should be rewarded for direct views. And that I think is as important as distribution of stake.
For the stake, just distribute to active users and also for sign up of new users.
Yeah it's really odd how they used to have 2 payout windows, one at 30 days, and just got rid of that and put in the single 7 day instead. Really hurts the idea of writing for longevity.
Something like over 90% or 95% of votes happen within 7 days of posting. The 30 day payout window was computationally inefficient as a result of the votes-over-time-since-post distribution that is actually observed on the blockchain. That's why it was removed. (I, too, disagreed with the decision until I learned that fact.)
As charitybot points out before, there used to be a longer payout window, but it was not really sustainable computationally. Remember, it's a decentralised blockchain holding all the data across servers all over the world, it's much harder to make it work.
This argument is pretty weak when there is no real limit on the ability of authors to just keep churning out posts and getting rewards from those new posts. The computational burden of one post that can earn for a long time vs. a series of posts one after another is mostly the same, and even favors the former.
It is more a matter of how the code is structured than inherent computational costs. And indeed that does matter in that there aren't infinite development resources and many improvements that are strongly desired (communities, SMTs, etc.)
Make being a witness more lucrative for witnesses that are out the top 20. I have substantial financial stake in STEEM as witness that owns a SEED and a Witness server and I am in process of putting together a full 512 GB ram RPC node for public use. Yet my daily reward is less than 4 STEEM. Better payouts would mean more witnesses willing to put up more hardware & bandwidth infrastructure providing the ability to span a longer payout window. This is something that is doable and would attract more quality content producers in turn groin STEEmit.com as a place to go to get good content.
Witnesses were paid much more before Hardfork 16. It was a unanimously popular decision to control inflation and make the Steem token more attractive to traders. Witnesses, Steem Power holders, the general reward pool alike took a pay cut, to limit inflation under 9%. All I'd say is, witnessing is a political position, and you have to campaign diligently to get higher up the ranks. It doesn't come for free, nothing does.
As for the multiple reward windows, it's not actually a question of having more witnesses, but rather runaway computational costs for each witness. I'm not a developer, so I don't know the exact details, but you can track down the GitHub issue for that to the know the exact reason why this decision was made. It was part of the Hardfork "Simplicity". 0.17.0 and 0.18.0, I think.
Creating a new account requires 0.1 steem and 10 delgated SP. So whales with, for example, 1million steem can create 100 thousand accounts that vote for themselves (or a proxy account). Am I misunderstanding something?
That's true currently, however the account registration protocols are changing soon with Hardfork 20.
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/hardfork-20-velocity-development-update