The single reward pool could work, but there was a decrease in rewards for comments for many months from what it was for awhile. This did decrease discussion some from what it was when this was not the case.
What were the causes and effects here? What was the time frame for this? There were a lot of changes in the overall behavior/activity of users during the large price decline. I don't think it's as simple as saying, "Comment rewards have decreased, so we probably need a separate pool."
In reality, pretty much everything fell off for several months. There's no evidence at all that having a separate rewards pool will actually resolve any of the issues or that not having one was the problem. In any case, if curation rewards are being cut from comments, you're not likely to see more voting for other people's comments. You're probably just going to see more self-voting.
The only problem I see here really is too many changes at once. If it fails, which change(s) caused the failure, if it succeeds which change(s) account for this success?
My proposal is no different than what Steemit, Inc. typically proposes. But at least the proposals that I'm offering are targeted/related and meant for long-term/wider appeal and adoption. It's meant to address the incentive structure for both content creators and content curators. It addresses those who have no need to invest and those who want to invest...and actually gain returns on that investment. The latter group is what will drive the value of Steemit up. If we're to give any preference at all to a group of users, it is the buyers of STEEM and those who power it up that should be preferred. But both sets of users are needed, so we need to balance the incentive/reward structure.
The answer to this when you have a lot of different changes is likely to be very unclear and likely based upon opinion and assumptions.
I agree. And in the case of the proposal from Steemit, Inc. - their assumptions about needing a separate comment rewards pool are quite wrong. We have plenty of data that points to a lower STEEM price, a reduction in curation rewards, and a tiny user base as the main culprits of the engagement/bot issues.
It's hard to say. You see there is a general flaw of people, myself included. To say IF YOU TRY THIS THING X THAT HAS NOT BEEN DONE BEFORE then THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN.
This can lead to paralysis or instead doing the same shit that already doesn't work because they don't want to try X.
Your points could be valid. I'm willing to try them all. As long as we don't act like the government and refuse to ditch something that when we try it makes things worse.
Yet, also assumptions and speculations are often wrong. So I'm willing to test pretty much any NEW idea to see what it does.
The problem is with too many ideas at once it can be difficult to determine what actually had a causation related factor.
The user interface changes... I'm fine with them doing a lot of those at once. You'll get good user feedback letting you know what works and doesn't work there.
The back-end stuff though we should be very focused on and not do too many things at once.
Agree with most of your comments here. A lot of things have been tried and not removed when they didn't result in any appreciable improvement. For example, the harsh and long reverse auction was added to discourage bot voting, yet we still have a significant amount of bot voting. The cut from 50% to 25% was intended to reduce the concentration of curation rewards going to the largest stakeholders but it was actually counterproductive (reduced curation incentives for the smallest stakeholders the most, and also starved good curation of resources). Etc. And too many things at once is an excellent, excellent point, one which has been repeatedly made every time a pork-laden hard fork has been proposed, only to repeatedly let it go through "one last time".
I'd like to see more frequent but smaller forks until we get out of beta so we can truly track which changes are causing what result. Or at least have a BETTER chance of tracking that.
Almost every issues with steem comes from the huge disparity in power, a lot of feature have been built to mitigate this but they create even more issue. Why not just solve the power distribution problem at the root? Pretty much all the curation rewards problems are cause by this influence disparity and many other stuff like no voting on comments,bots domination,scalability,user experience,etc...