Independent Comment Reward Pool
Great idea that's been a long time coming.
We are proposing that comments be allocated 38% (golden ratio) of the current reward pool
That is way too much though. It's true that comments add value (more value than they are rewarded with now) and the very good comments should definitely be rewarded highly. But 38% of the entire pool is unrealistically high. A separate comment pool will increase comment quality but the posts that drive the discussion are worth far more than 62%.
Edit: I forgot. A separate comment pool will behave differently if there's a separate comment vote power per account or not. The comment pool idea works best with a separated comment vote power in my opinion. In this way, people with a lot of stake won't see voting on comments as an opportunity cost.
Also, there will probably be a lot more comments than posts. So comment rewards will end up much smaller and probably need a high percentage of the reward to be divided between so many comments.
Agreed, and comments don't benefit as much from bot voting. So when they are upvoted, it is a more accurate representation of their value.
So 38% is definitely not too much, it is just fine.
For the same reason I think curation rewards should get more than 25%
I played around with an idea that would increase %of curation rewards for certain authors Personally I think content is King and should be rewarded significantly more than curators. But we could increase incentive for finding the underdogs (new up and coming authors) by giving 50% curation rewards for upvoting someone with 0 followers and scale it to something limited like 1000 followers where the curation rewards are 20%. This would encourage competition between the advantaged (already known authors with a following) and the underdogs (new users who need visibility)
Agreed. I'm not even sure why there needs to be any specific allocation for comments. If you're commenting just for the sake of comment rewards, you're doing it wrong. That's not really "engagement." We already have a bunch of users who comment-spam on the platform. I would expect to see a lot more of that if there was a rewards pool just for commenting.
We also have a bunch of users who comment despite not having a separate pool for it. People who want to engage will engage anyway. I don't see much of a benefit taking away from posting rewards. Could it encourage more post engagement? Possibly. But I would lean towards more of a spam/bot issue and more tension from a lack of overall blog post rewards.
[EDIT] - As we can see on this post, commenting and comment rewards actually do work right now. I think this is evidence enough that we don't need separate pools and voting power for it. If posts are lacking engagement, it likely has to do with visibility and interest, not a lack of dedicated funds for comments. This seems like a "fix" to a non-existent problem.
Sometimes comments are more valuable then the original post ;)
True.
Sure. But those comments are usually rewarded. Why do we need a separate pool?
A 38 percent comment pool will drastically increase active users. It might Ben too high buyback it's worth starting too high than lowering . Look Arvind reddit all the value is commenters. It will also change the popular posts to be more conducive to comments
I agree that it's mostly a UI issue.
I think you drove over someone at 0:20
also what a classic "reply to top comment for visibility" move.
If the STEEM price hits $100, that's when @ats-david is "peacing out."
such a outstanding relaxed blogger–style… I have to vote up!
Agree. That number is way too high.
I've always been happy with payouts on comments as it is (at 1% apparently), even at the current price of STEEM. I remember receiving nearly $1,000 on some comments prior to 7/4. Were comments also receiving 1% prior to 7/4 and if so, won't we have that too look forward to as/if the price of STEEM climbs?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, which is likely, but I agree with pfunk that 38% is way too high.
Would a change to 38% mean that his current $4.28 earnings (on the comment above) on 9 upvotes be around $163 under the proposed change? That seems exorbitant for an opinion, not that I wouldn't mind those kind of payouts on comments again. ;)
But, what happens when the price of STEEM increases? Will comments be receiving $10,000?
Why would anyone blog?
I would setup a comment factory (some would argue I'm already running one). ;)
I believe we'll need a solution for scaling reward levels with price increases
We have one. It attracts more users to compete for those rewards.
Even with more users competing (I suppose you mean more posts or comments?) we will go back to over the top rewards. The outsized lottery effect going into $10,000 a post is arguably a good or bad thing - I'd personally advocate to not see it again. Consider all the adjustable variables - for instance, target votes per day - that can be adjusted to expand or shrink distribution.
Would it make sense to cap the rewards and distribute the excess yearly for example? So making good posts consistently in the low tide would be encouraged as well.
At 38%, even at current rewards, abusive comment spam would increase dramatically. It also creates an avenue of pool rewards abuse. Something like 5 to 10% at the most would be way more reasonable.
That would be way too low in my opinion. There could be 100x as many comments as posts and even if only 10% of them are worth rewarding that's still 10 times as many comments than posts with a much smaller reward pool.
Some posts are long enough already. Not everyone will want to read 100s of comments to curate them. Furthermore, unless it gets an upgrade, the Steemit UI isn't very efficient when it comes to posts with a lot of comments. I know my browser locks up if I view some previous @steemitblog posts, because of the many comments.
That's true. But isn't that a different issue? The site loads incredibly slow anyway and that's not because there's money to be made...
Besides you don't need to read the comments to curate. I would hope there would be no curation reward for upvoting comments.
5% sounds very reasonable.
Without a separate pool, there is already spam. Whether we want to call it "abuse" or not, plenty of users already upvote their own comments with trails, and larger stakeholders have often voted themselves - or every comment on a post. This new comment rewards pool would simply create another way for different types of abusers to abuse.
Something like 0% would be reasonable. There's really no reason for a separate pool. As I pointed out already - this very post demonstrates that engagement and comment payouts is just fine. If we want more engagement on regular posts, maybe we should work on attracting and retaining more users? That's the real issue here, not the lack of a comment rewards pool.
I can't speak for the voters putting comments over $1 but I am upvoting more comments in this post because they are important to reward for expressing their opinions about the future of Steem. I regularly upvote good comments elsewhere but not nearly as much as posts. And I often treat comment voting as a ranking mechanism rather than a reward one.
Yeah, same here.
What I'm really trying to figure out is why so many people believe that comment rewards are necessary for engagement. Go to every major social media platform and you'll find thousands, or millions of users commenting and upvoting other comments all the time...for no rewards. So, what is it that's creating the engagement on those platforms that we are allegedly "missing" here on Steemit (which I don't even believe is true)?
The answer: Users.
What is the purpose for creating a separate rewards pool for comments?
If the purpose is to increase engagement, it won't work. You need active users to do that. Without active users willing to engage, you're likely just going to be encouraging and rewarding spam, or otherwise meaningless engagement.
If the purpose is to just have a separate rewards pool, then what functional purpose does that serve? Why is it a necessary change for the blockchain?
What is the actual problem that would be fixed by this hard fork? The post says this:
You can't engage more people in discussion if you're lacking the "more people" part of the equation. Step one would be: Get more people interested in Steemit. If, after more people are here and active, the engagement is too low (which, again, I don't believe is true), then try to find ways to increase/improve it.
No it doesn't mean that, because voting behavior will change. Most likely there will be a lot more voting on comments and more comments being rewarded so the $163 would be split up a lot more ways. Also probably more comments (both good and bad).
You can not evaluate actions taken under one set of rules as if they would occur unchanged under a different set of rules.
Very True, I tend to only vote on the comments made to my posts, in hopes to gain readers, if there was no limit or a different limit to voting on comments I would vote on many more comments, being some of them to me add value to the original post.
I THInk there will be so many comments payouts will drop. On top comments but rise on mediocre comments
38% is high if only 1-2 comments are made but low if 100 comments are made!
So the solution to this would be its a variable number that get increased (max 38%) when the commenter’s are more, and to avoid spam comments it should be weighted/related more to the HIGH SP commenter’s (so it increases if total SP from accounts that participate are increasing)
I can't tell whether 38% is too high or not. However, I'm confident that it should not be implemented as a step-change. Phase it in over the course of a couple months. Better yet, develop a dynamic mechanic of some sort that allows the comment reward fraction to vary over time.
I agree that a dynamic function would be best but I don't agree that a phase in a good idea, in that it will be difficult to tell whether it actually has any effects (good or bad) while the usage of the site and other things are changing over a period of months. Better to try something more visible and it if it causes obvious problems it can be revised.
I see your point, and I guess a step-change wouldn't be a huge catastrophe. Here's a nice blend of the two: ensure that the hard fork and payout rules affect only comments posted after the hard fork. Then we get a nice 7-day period for the changes to implicitly phase in.
Absolutely. This is more critical to supporting comments than a separate reward pool for comments (although I support that too). There can be different parameters for each vote power tracker too (the parameters determine how many votes to cast per day to not waste your full voting potential).
I also think the number is quite high and I'm worrying about new types of abuse using comments. But this can boost new contents market, e.g. SteemOverflow, where comments/replies are more valuable than posts.
There's an argument to be made that, in addition to the other benefits of raising the comment reward pool to that level, there is value to be gained from the act of exposing the types of abuse that will emerge at 38%, as well as seeing if it is in fact true that abuse will emerge. It isn't until they see the abuse that they can develop systems to counter it. One simple solution to a torrent of comment abuse would be simply lowering the percentage. But again, this assumes that the abuse will come, which is not 100%. Of course, no matter what percentage is suggested there will be some people who think it is too high and some who think it is too low. I think we will only find out by experimentation. I highly doubt 38% is the magic number, but it might be better than what we have now. It is definitely true that experimenting with the number is better than not.
I agree, the number may be to high, but if the votes on comments no longer took away from my main voting power I would vote on more comments. Making more reason for a considerable payout. I think the lack of comments on some posts like mine is simply due to lack of a possible reward. I have been told I make great points, but to few want to spend time commenting since to some people there is no value to comment unless there are votes on the main post that will make the comments count for something.
This! Rewards would stimulate discussion. It would change the rhythm of interacting in a good way. Some of my posts were helped a lot by discussions.
Probably a better solution to excessive abuse would not be changing the number, but changing the structure (of something, possibly UI) to address the abuse. That is not to say I think 38% is the "right" number because I don't, but it's a reasonable experiment.
We can cross that bridge when we get there. Steem isn't there yet.
Flagging for being a repetitive bot. =b
Does not compute
This is a similar circular argument to the one I called out Dan about (and you upvoted my comment there). Steem gets to where it isn't now in part by broadening the rule set to be less narrowly focused on a particular type of post-centric content (and long-form post-centric at that). That will open up the incentives for other types of content and engagement to (potentially) flourish. I was personally involved with an effort to try to spark interest in comment-centric engagement which didn't go anywhere for a variety of reasons but lack of rewards and voting power for comments was one of them. I'd prefer to see a mechanism where rewards flow to wherever there is perceived value and engagement, whether that happens to be posts or comments without any specific quota on each but given that isn't happening now this seems like a reasonable experiment.
I see your point there. I said what I said above because I haven't seen any development towards a comment plugin for Steem yet and haven't perceived much demand for such a thing yet. I think that kind of thing will be viable with much less than 38% of the rewards.
Separate comment vote power is an interesting idea and is something to ponder.
I think 38% would be too high at the current level of engagement. However, with the separating of the reward pool, it's reasonable to believe that we will see significantly more high-quality comments. Steemit badly needs more readers and commenters, and I think 38% is a good place to start.
Although I agree with the proposal, the funny thing is I get way more engagement on Steemit than I do on other platforms despite lower views. I get comments on pretty much all my posts, even shitty low effort ones. The median for comments per post is on any given day usually 2 (sometimes 1, sometimes 3), the mean hovers around 5. Source: http://steempunks.com/charts
Occasionally a post is trending and stands out for lack of engagement, but generally there are loads of comments on the top posts as well, given that we have merely 1500 active users per day and that probably includes vote bots.
In comparison the vast majority of my tweets go unresponded to despite having been on the platform for years. When I make a reddit post, I'll be lucky if I get any replies.
That's not too much IMO. Remember that the 62% goes to the very few bloggers while that 38% is split up amongst many many commenters.
Also, think of the value for social networks. Ever been in a Facebook debate? I have seen many rebuttals that deserve to win a Nobel prize compared to the crappy original status update!
Maybe it's also forward thinking to increase engagement when comments only are added on standard websites/blogs that exist outside of the blockchain. A larger pool would make them more attractive than FB or Disqus comments plugins. just my 2 cents.
We can cross that bridge when we get there. Steem isn't there yet.
I don't know this is a problem. If there isn't enough voting on comments, then the value of a vote on a comment will be higher than the value of a vote on a post. This should reach an equilibrium even with shared voting power. I haven't thought a lot about the behavior with combined or separate vote powers. There are probably indeed some important differences, but I don't think separating vote power is clearly necessary.
I'm not so sure about the 38% reward being too high, it would greatly increase the social aspect of the site. Currently we have lot's of autovotes, it's not unusual to see posts with hundreds of votes but under 30 views, rather common actually. Commenters actually read the posts and engage with the user, without any user interaction can we call this a social platform? So in my opinion we should try 38% first.
I also agree that 38% is way too high. Try 10% first.
I fully agree with this! I was actually about to say the same thing.
I agree a separate voting power for comment would make more sense.
Also what about trying the separate pool feature with 2% and not 38%. This would already double what the rearws are right now.
Let's not forgot reddit commenters are super happy with 0 reward and it's in the top 10 websites with crazy engagement.
Yeah - I see posts on Facebook with 50 or 100+ comments all the time. None of them are receiving comment rewards.
The problem is that we have a very tiny amount of users. Of course we're not going to have much engagement when there are only a few hundred actual people engaging on the platform every day. They're trying to fix a problem with the wrong solution.
I get your point and I agree.
Maybe at this point in time the increase is needed, this could be reduced at the proper time?
I don't believe so. We need more active users, not more rewards schemes for the tiny amount of users that are currently here.