I'm not good with numbers, at all, but yes, we are playing with less competition for the same (and even quite high!) overall reward pool. Perfect time for 'us' who stuck it out during this bull market and kept posting, curating, commenting all these months. (I recently found my first grey hairs, can you believe it? That's no coincidence.)
And yes, these dollar values influence voting behaviour, including mine, even though they shouldn't, since a vote of a 'certain amount of Vests' is just that 'a vote of a certain amount of Vests'.
It will take time and a lot of rerouting in the brain before we can think in STEEM value 100%. Often we keep exchanging the rates, as I kept doing years after the euro was implemented. The moments I know I'm going into the right direction is when I see a price in STEEM and think 'wish I could pay in euro, rather keep my STEEM'.
Thinking in Steem is surprisingly hard to do but is a useful way to think. I started thinking about this a while ago when I changed my voting behavior on comments due to price increases and subsequent decreases. A large voter gives a 1% vote on a comment and it could be 5 dollars and that is the smallest they can do. That same voter now with similar vests will add 1 dollar with a 4% vote. Te person receiving the vote doesn't realise that in steem terms, they are actually getting more.
I was on an auto 'whale vote' for a few months that stayed the same percentage wise in all these months and I saw my posts go from 80$ to 13$ in a matter of months. I knew intellectually 'it didn't matter' but a non-Steemian friend who reads my blog asked me 'why are you earning less and less each week?'
It made me realize it will take a lot of educating once the 'normies'/masses get on board :-) Maybe we should have a 'Vest' value next to the dollar payout - because how many voting Vests you receive on a post is actually more telling... of how well you are doing. Just thinking out loud
Yep, I would say it is partly by design that the vests aren't shown. For the normies it is easier to understand but, they don't really understand. A lot of the people who lose faith because their voting returns go down don't realise they may actually be earning more. Only the people who live off or are cashing out need to worry about price of the moment.
Exactly.
For all the others we should gamify the Vest thing without even talking about it. Just show some cool graphs with growth of account and growth of average post 'strength' (we need to brainstorm the cooler terms) and learn people to follow up on their progress via that instead of the post payout in $.
I find it annoying that the $ symbol is even used. It's not clear what it means. STU is very confusing even for people that has been here a long time. A new symbol is needed.
It does create some confusion but, maybe that is the point ;)
Maybe you are on to something ;-)