A case for differentiated user driven customizable voting incentives
Every community is different
Let me just compare a breaking news focused community and a philosophy community. The main difference is that breaking news is very time critical. So you want to reward fast posts in a short timeframe. Time has almost no relevance for the philosophy community. Here comprehensive arguments are much more important and philosophy articles often take a long time to develop and digest for the readers. So an incentive structure that allows to reward a post several years old would be desirable.
So the option to setup different voting incentives to reflect the nature of the topic or community involved would add value to steemit. This could be done by superusers who create and market a channel they are passionate about and therefore have a deep understanding of.
The developers are wasting time optimizing voting incentives
A lot of time can used discussing and adjusting variables to gain some desirable behavior of the users. The problem is that the target is always moving. The best way to spend time as a developer is to create a structure that is self evolving to reflect what the users actually need and want. This way the developers can instead spend their valuable time on adding new feature to the system. An adaptive system based on superuser input would open for this kind of system.
Smart contracts could be the solution
A smart contract is useful to coordinate financial and voting logic. It would be the ideal system to facilitate the this proposal.
The more logic you put in a smart contract, the more chances it has of having a security exploit. But what would said smart contracts be useful for?
The users of a channel would give up their rewards to a smart contract. This contract would coordinate the votes and money and give it back to the posters. This way each channel can have their own voting logic.
So essentially locking up the funds in a smart contract so a bot would use the money to make said money into more money? That can be done by individual users doing crowdfunds or a smart contract platform like rootstock is to bitcoin. I don't think it's nessesary to add trustless smart contracts to steemit, because that idea is lacking in research and development.
Just look at ethereum. It has only like 3 working DAPPs so far. There isn't a need for smart contracts currently.
I've found, that using smart contracts may possibly be not so bad idea. Depending on the implementation of course.
If we were to have a steemit upvote button next to each porn video on redtube, we'd either need bots to create the posts for us or some kind of smart contract network layer. I wouldn't know anything about the latter, since I'm not that familiar with smart contracts. I find that all of this is currently semi workable with automation bots(lots of spam). Each platform could have their own megathread, so'd they wouldn't bother others as much.
I tried explaining my concept trough gaming in this post:
https://steemit.com/games/@ubg/how-steemit-could-change-the-gaming-industry
I may have unconsciously developed that idea from you. Thanks if this is the case.
I think smart contracts may be more than is called for in this case.
It might be as simple as a dashboard where the admin can tweak various settings?
Maybe. It could work this way: "The users of a channel would give up their rewards to a smart contract. This contract would coordinate the votes and money and give it back to the posters. This way each channel can have their own voting logic. "
with time that will probably come, like reddit.
check my new post too
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@raphma/hey-steemit-professional-poker-player-and-senior-member-from-bitcointalk-coming-in
Great idea! The current structure has a lot of problems. It would be neat to have a bunch of steemit subforums with different rules/incentive structures for different kinds of posts.
I really like the idea. I think it would be a great way to give each area/community control and ability to customize how rewards are given within their own area.
Interesting !
My project is creating transparent and incentivized science. Your ideas play into mine exactly. More here: https://steemit.com/science/@transhuman/a-proposal-for-an-incentivized-synthetic-biology-system-subchain-on-the-steem-blockchain-platform