I'm fresh over here from Kevins post actually, had just finished commenting :)
I like the idea, but it sounds like a tough one to implement.
Where are the funds stored? How are the rankings decided upon? Are just two initial worries.
You are right though in that curation as it stands is a race to front-run bidbots/utopian votes/large accounts letting smaller votes in, whilst the actual content quality is almost irrelevant.
What I have noticed though in my time here, is that the very best curation rewards come from (depending on your SP) spreading your vote out as wide as possible, whilst not rendering the vests you apply to a vote irrelevant. This is though, massively time-consuming and with rewards as they are when compared to just slapping a selfie on, just not a good time/cost venture.
It's an interesting one though, but yeah, how do judge the curation quality, and who keeps the float?
Some kind of system based loosely around your curation and engagement leagues? I have absolutely no clue as to how that would look, but I'm sure there are many people smarter than I am that would be able to pull something together.
It's the old chestnut, 'what is quality content'. The league focus more on engagement of account, and less on what they are actually upvoting. As long as the vote spread is good, and they are commenting away, I'm happy.
There's no golden answer to define quality content that matches everyone's ideal, and so the concept of rewarding curators for spotting golden eggs becomes tough.
Really, it is the whole premise of the curation system. You find something at 20 cents and it goes to 200$, you receive a 'good' reward for doing so.
However, when you can stick a self-vote down (mine being about $2.20 at present), and take about $3 in liquid from that in 7 days time, who is going to care about spending hours seeking golden content?
I think engagement and quality content go hand in hand really. Good content will, by nature, encourage comment and engagement, whereas spammy crap is unlikely to garner much interest. Perhaps a move away from pure curation and toward engaging in conversation and activity could be a solution to growing a community rather than a "content farm" of low quality posts.
I think letting the community decide is as good a barometer as any. You have the problem of higher stakes having more of a say but that's a problem that is consistent across the platform, so no NEW problems there.
You'd have to make getting on the top 100 curators list more profitable than self voting, and for smaller curators, the promise of getting up there. If it takes more than 25% of the reward pool, I'm ok with that.
Honestly I'd also very much prefer a toying with the algorithms, a new curve, to give minnows and small dolphins a higher VP weight per vest compared to whales or something along those lines. I believe the existence of super whale sized upvotes is ALWAYS going to be a huge threat to the platform. A little less incentive for huge investors to become even larger investors would likely help the masses want to get invested in steem, including youtube and other social media personalities who are looking for somewhere to go......urgh, i forgot about multiple accounts, they could just make 10 dolphin accounts rather than one whale account....urgh!
I have a hard time seeing how this would go any different than voting for witnesses, which IMO, has proven to be an absolutely terrible mechanic for selecting the most deserving witnesses. In all likelihood the leading vote getters would be the same usual suspects who are already the highest stake users, who are already top witnesses, who are (half of them) selling their vote on top of it. This would just be one more cherry on top for them, they would get all the curation rewards as well.
I can see the argument here. But they’re all making that money through curation rewards now anyway and this way at least there might be a little more motivation to behave because people’s support for your curation efforts would matter (not to say curators couldn’t form a circle jerk. But it seems most people agree that the top 20 witnesses is not full of assholes. I see an effort among them being made to stop circle jerking each other. Or at the very least stopping support for the ones like Jerry who has been accused of upvote4upvote as a witness.
My point is, it might be bad but it couldn’t be much worse than what we have now.
The only other solution I can think of to stop all the wealth from flowing to the top is to end self voting and multiple accounts by means of ended anonyminity, and this wouldn’t stop circle jerking but at least people might feel more accountable if we did this and then went to a one person one vote system. I don’t like this idea because I appreciate having anonymity as an option, also there are obvious benefits to the community in opening some initiative based accounts. I don’t really want this to be the road steemit takes because if it is, I don’t see it acting very different from Facebook in the future, but I can’t see any other way to efficiently keep the wealth from concentrating at the top at an exponential pace.
Anonymity as a choice is positive for social media but it doesn’t seem to work with this stake based voting system nor does it allow for a one person=one vote system. Too easy to game with multiple accounts and circle jerking. Then again we could turn into minds where everyone is arguing....urgh Hahaha this post is the best idea I’ve got aside from the continued effort to shape the culture of the platform and tovweight everything towards the “middle class” of steemit.
What deserves a vote for quality curation is up to the individual, everyone is free to decide where to spend their votes and can change whenever they want, the same way we can for witnesses.
I'm a concept guy, not a tech guy, so I'm not sure about the difficulties, but it doesn't sound any more complicated than the witness system.
The only problems I can forsee is that it could turn into a circle jerk the same way witnesses have, but we seem to have a bunch of top 50 witnesses who want to try to change the circle jerkyness which means it should be do-able if people are interested in the idea.