Blog, Vote and Get Paid
This is what everybody who signed up in the platform are expecting and we could not blame them if majority of them are leaving after making few posts.
Every blogger, writer, and author in the community were already doing good in submitting their content in various social media networks and blogging sites. Upon knowing Steemit sources, friends, colleagues, ads, news and other media sources, they automatically made themselves available for the platform especially that upon reaching the home page, they saw posts with thousands of rewards for just a few hours after posting.
These things excite all of them, telling themselves that this could be what we we've been waiting for, being rewarded by producing good quality contents.
Requirement for Upvotes
What these authors didn't know is that they have to be a friend or chosen by the so-called whales or being in their network, they have to be a guru, they have to be famous to earn good rewards in the community. Even in the absence of this knowledge, they started to post good quality contents hoping that they will be satisfied like what they are seeing in various authors.
I've been in the platform since 1st week of July 2016 and I'm online everyday to check out what's in the platform for me. But since I have problem with creating articles, I just spent my time reading. I have read so many articles in the platform, I've heard all the things that happened.
Currently, the platform has around 100K signup users (forgive me if I'm wrong) and only 30% of it are active.
What is Happening?
Based on my observation, lots of real writers came and signup for the community as a social media platform that will give rewards to those active members by posting and curating good quality contents. After few days and weeks of posting, joining conversation in chat rooms, making comments, these writers felt bored because their articles are not getting enough rewards. There not few, there are thousands of them, some of them are living and if this trend will continue, what will be left behind in the platform are those friend of the whales and those who belong in their network.
Everybody here in the platform is expecting for the rewards. Those who said that we don't need good rewards because they are enjoying sharing their contents and letting the world know about something they knew and that they are happy with it because they are also learning so many things in the platform are just fooling themselves, they are just pretending.
My Proposal
Everybody here came for money and that's the reality of the platform, it's undeniable. I would like to suggest a system that would make everybody in the Steemit community happy.
What if every time an article is posted, an instant reward will be given to that post right after posting it based on the author's reputation. For instance, if the author has a reputation of 60, then his post will receive an instant rewards of 60 SBD and if somebody will vote for the article, it will be treated as an additional rewards.
In this manner, authors will stop hunting whale's vote, because their attention will be focus on increasing their reputation because by doing so, they are also increasing their rewards.
We don't have to worry about plagiarism anymore because everybody will take good care of their reputation because their rewards depends on it. If in any case, an author is guilty of plagiarism, he will then be punish immediately by lowering his reputation back to (1)one. If he's going to leave because of it, it's not steemit's fault but his.
With this kind of reward system in the platform, people will not be moving away from the community anymore because they can have what they wanted, and the expected number of users will increase drastically in no time, which will increase the life of the community.
What we have are 100k accounts but not users. I couldn't even be sure if we have 30k users. Many users have more than one account. Miners for example can make as many accounts as they like (at a small price) without the need for a reddit or Facebook account. I'm not a miner, so I'm not sure what the purpose of this is, but I think for whales it can be useful for curating purposes. (Again I'm not sure how but lots of whales have smaller dolphin accounts for curating) Possibly bot-run. Possibly it's a means of being more careful with the vote of their main account since voting like a bot with such high rewards could lead to problems (I'm totally speculating here).
This would be bad indeed. This would not be in the best interest of the whales and they know that if steemit became a sort of private club then steem will eventually lose value. Unless of course there is a new demand for steem. For example for another non-blogging platform.
Personally I think selling "steemit" to people as a way to make money is actually BAD for steemit. Steemit should be described to people as a "support network" rather than a social network where people get paid. Though I understand some day it will be a social network, in its current beta form I wouldn't describe it as one. I am indeed making friends on steemit, but they become my followers and therefore my supporters, and they offer not just upvotes but also critique and additional facts & ideas.
What makes steemit great is not that you can make money, but rather, that people are incentivised to write quality content and constructive criticism and to be respectful of each other, due to the small possibility of making a buck here or there.
If we set people up to expect big rewards, then of course people will return to Facebook where they don't have to feel that disappointment in themselves.
There are some problems with this idea because it is possible for users to sell an account with a high rep. However you may be on to something. Take a look at the most recent post by @dantheman where he talks about the idea of monetising reputation. :)
And this proposal is the best way of rewarding an author's reputation, I think this is what monetizing reputation is all about.
While this idea may seem like a more fair solution at face value, it is currently completely infeasible for the steem blockchain to pay out a consistent amount based on reputation, as the rewards are sourced from the reward pool of mined currency in the form of steem, which is allocated by stake weighted voting. It will heavily reduce the value of steem to distribute fixed rewards for posting, and remove the incentive to produce quality content. People would simply make a large number of small posts, instead of investing time into detailed content. It would be difficult to stop people from simply posting one sentence several times a day, as they could easily escape flags in the crowd. For this idea to be feasible, it would need to be refined as such -
1 - Hard fork the steem blockchain to change the reward pool code by allocating a percentage (e.g. 10%) of the reward pool steem to a "daily bonus" pool.
2 - Every 24 Hours, each account above 30 reputation that has made at least one post in that time receives a share in the daily bonus pool proportional to their (reputation-30) squared.
This way, people are still given a minimum reward for posting, while not placing extreme inflationary pressure on the supply of SBD, and encouraging the widespread spamming of posts for repeated rewards. This has to be rate limited, and cannot possibly be paid on a per post basis. This would also not be a very significant amount of SBD per user, and would be unlikely to exceed 0.50 SBD per active user.
My proposal is an idea and regarding its implementation it has to be design by the geniuses of the community. You mentioned that people might just post many different post consisting of one paragraph and boom, there goes the reward. Simply NO, rules must be set, like for instance putting a minimum words per post like 1k words per article. This way author will submit a really good and high quality post.
I don't understand much about the economy of the steemit but I think this proposal will increase all steem (STEEM, STEEM POWER & SBD) because portion of every rewards will go to SP and STEEM.
Words per post have nothing to do with quality.
You don't seem to understand that the whole reason for curating and rewarding people is to filter posts for quality.
Your solution just pays people for posting - so you put some rules about minimum words - that means nothing. Somebody could use a bot to churn out posts that meet the criteria and get the payout.
If the system is able to pay out automatically then it is possible for a bot to be designed which can make posts that meet that criteria. @dahaz159 has pointed out why your system could never work.
Dan and Ned are not stupid they have thought long and hard about the current system.
The geniuses of the community have come up with the current system.
It is not perfect but nothing is.
The number of words was just to answer your comment about an author who automatically gain rewards even posting 1 sentence.
With regards to the quality of the content, that's another story. Rules must design properly to avoid abuse and the with the existing smart people in the community, I believe designing and implementing the rules is not a problem.
That's not really an answer. You are suggesting a change which ruins the way the old system works but your solution to the problems is "someone else will think of it". Maybe the others will think of a solution or maybe not.
I didn't.
Sure, at some basic level I came for the money, but only because it is wrapped up with a social network that hopefully the NSA doesn't already have a huge stake in ...
Fortunately for me, I had no illusions about the velocity of money within the system. Using some basic fiscal logic, it seems obvious that not any Tom, Dick, or Jane who signs up and starts posting - even someone skilled - is going to make a living wage through Steemit, let alone any significant money. Being an early stage cryptocurrency, it can be little else than a long term investment.
Perhaps this is actually a valuable msg that can attract and retain a lot of quality thinkers. Promote the long term investment reality. There is so much value in steem investment other than "making money."
So being careful about promoting Steem as
"Get paid to post online!"
in favor of something that gets the right juices flowing for quality growth and sustainability, like:
"build community and invest in a budding cryptocurrency all at the same time!
There are lots of social media sites which is much more develop than steemit and if author or anybody wanted a pure socialization this is not the place for now because traffic are less and only few to none cares about it I guess. There are huge sites where an author can gain huge social networks.
Putting the trending page at the home page is the proof that steemit were advertised and promoted for that way. It was purposely placed there to entice anybody who visited the website.
You did just fine with this one. Maybe you should write more often :D
As for the proposal, I think you may be on to something. I mean an aspect of that could probably be used as a basis for future tuning of the incentives.
I don't have talent in writing, I just came to this idea yesterday because I've noticed that lots of authors are moving away. There are people that I do not see anymore which I've seen them very often when I just signup.
Also, if this system will be implemented, all the members of the platform that are now sleeping will be awaken and be alive again.
You have a good reputation, can you resteem this post?
Not all reasons are monetary. A lot of the writers, don't even know what to write next, experiencing a creative block.
Regarding resteeming: I've decided to avoid using it because it messes up people's feeds. That includes my own posts as well.
"Not all reasons are monetary".
You mean that there are authors who didn't expect monetary rewards from the platform. Why are they here for, to learn and be acquainted? If you they wanted to learn, they can do it from the other sites too.
They are here because they heard that the platform is giving rewards for every submitted content and if they cant find that expectation, its certain that they will soon leave the community same with anybody who will have the same experience, which I know a lot of them does.
Sorry I didn't write that accurately. I mean that not all reasons for writers stopping is related to money. There are authors who were making money and still stopped or slowed down a lot. You'd think that a successful writer will milk it as much as they can, but even they aren't able to produce all the time. Whether you are making money, or not, at some point you have to slow down / take a break.
You are both right! People first come here for the money, and also (especially when they don't make anything) take a break. Or leave. The rewards are a good motivator. Or non-motivator. But it's refreshing to hear someone come right out and state it in black-and-white: yes, we all came here for the duckets. I think what happens is that some of us get caught up in the social aspect, and then another type of addiction sets in.
Yes, its natural to us human beings to make a pause because we need to rest but the moment they write and submitted a post, they are all expecting the same thing, to be rewarded.
It's genius but I do't really think @dan and @ned are going to implement that anyhow. If everybody is going to receive SBDs instantly, then gradually the amount of SBDs will be equal to zero. There is no way it can be created as an infinite cycle but the idea is really fascinating.
It's not genius. It removes curation from the equation and allows people to just post complete trash.
Personally, I think the parameters and algorithms for reward allocation are almost perfectly tuned. The bigger problem is getting people to increase the size of the pool of assets, the market cap. By itself, though, the current price level bottoming out, investors will start to come in more and more.
The community has matured quickly and most of the shake-out has happened and now people are not so narrowly focused on how the little bit on top is redistributed and starting to think more broadly, in my view, providing more options for investors is a major thing. I have proposed the idea of an alternative to Steem Power, that allows an investor to be more passive and not have to participate in curation, in exchange for a reasonable increase in its dividends. Investors chase after curation rewards to boost their yield, but this in itself is not a qualification for good curation.
The other thing is improvements in interfaces, and increasing the amount of utilisation of the steem currency backbone as a system of banking, this is starting to happen with sites like peerhub, and there will for sure be more of this.
Ultimately, rewards are just an incentive to get people to find out about Steem, and about cryptocurrency. The real goal is to develop a new type of corporate organisation that is open-ended and driven by innovation.
Great points as always:)
It makes me think about a post topic, actually, explaining to people that basically the rewards system in effect charges every holder of steem and steem backed assets a tiny amount of money to keep the blog and especially the pool of witnesses up and running. This is by its very nature a loss-making process, and this is why people need to understand the real thing that needs to happen most of all is that people park their money, and that they do their banking with Steem for their business projects. Without a growth in the capital base, the rewards must necessarily shrink.
Resteem, for those who like the proposal.
Interesting proposal, but I think that it's not so simple.
What you mean not simple, its technicalities or its implementation? If its technicalities, it's not hard because there are lots of great minded people in the community and with their knowledge everything is possible.
As to its implementation, its more realistic because majority of the great authors here in the platform were already engage in posting good content in various social media and content sites and if steemit will not make any difference nothing will hold them to stay because they can do better on the other sites if they are only after for audience.
With this system, the platform will be flooded with signups, more audience for the authors and more traffic for steemit.
So I can upload four posts a day just with photo I made by myself and earn 240$ every day without upvotes? That would be great, but it's not possible. That is the reason why is not so simple.
No, there has to be rules to be set. If an author post a photo, there has to be an explanation or an introduction about that photo making it more realistic.
And yes if you made 4 post a day at reputation 60, you have instant 240$ but we all know that all of the rewards all liquid. Portion of it will go to the SP & STEEM.
This is a curious idea, but not sustainable long-term. I think that's sustainability is the word that people are worried about. BUT I do think this idea could be repackaged in a different way that would work: as a Bounty. You could think of this as a shot in the arm to get the community moving and growing again. First, you market a $20 bounty for all users who post within a given timeframe or day. (Let's make it Christmas Day December 25th since it is quite literally a gift, and $50 is a bit much.) What happens is that everyone will begin to market to their friends and associates the bounty, giving Steemit more notoriety. People will sign up in large numbers. A small percentage (as it is now) will remain from those groups. Then the process could be repeated again and again. But you also give the bounty to current members, so that people keep coming back after they leave. Think of this like that ubitquitous 20% Bed Bath and Beyond coupon, or that ever-persistent $10 Kohl's Cash that ends up in your mailbox every month. It's ten bucks... but you have to come back all the time to use it with some effort involved (Using it on certain dates, have to use Kohl's card, etc. etc.) There has got to be an upside for Steemit somewhere in your idea, and I think the idea of a bounty is more suited for this sort of giveaway, and gives more bang for the Steemit Backed Buck.