1/3 reduction in posting rewards will discourage "many good writers"? I doubt it. Which ones, exactly, will quit if they earn 1/3 less? (Or maybe that won't even happen because better curation rewards will engage more users and attract more investors as OP suggested, increasing the size of the pool.)
As for my own rewards, those were achieved only using a paid staff of 10 curators (some working close to full time) with much of the rewards going back to them as salary and bonuses. I've since had to cut back on paid curation because the economics no longer support it.
I'm now working on a revised and downscaled program with less risk and exposure for me. As curation becomes more competitive and as the size of the reward pool in VESTS shrinks each day it, becomes tougher and tougher to justify high level professional curators (who IMO did a great job which included finding some great posts that did extremely well once promoted, but sat undiscovered for 10 hours in some cases).
There is no free lunch here.
I disagree that we would lose good writers. We may lose some writers alright, but not the good ones. The fact that we're getting paid at all is revolutionary, and I agree that the curator should be valued as much as the writer. My writing has no value without those who read it and those who promote it.
My only concern is with the ongoing distribution. With increased curation rewards for whales and decreased author rewards for minnows, wouldn't this increased the disparity between whales and minnows?
And as you've said before, one of your reasons for powering down is to try to spread the rewards more evenly. I have absolutely nothing against whales powering down and it's my belief that if the system were to discourage whales from doing this, this would further discourage investors. However, I can see that from those who cannot see what's going on from the outside, from the markets point of view it just doesn't look good. So I'm wondering how we can address this to make potential buyers aware that with steem this trend is different from when you see it with other cryptocurrencies.
Also, as suggested by one of my brothers who are here on steemit, perhaps we need further incentive not just for whales, but for minnows to buy steem. Website perks for example might be a good way to attract a small amount of investment from a lot of minnows. Since becoming a dolphin feels like a goose chase without using your money, because of the difference between a $10 and a $3000 account. If there were better incentives to try to reach an $P of $500 worth, we might see a lot more users reaching into their pockets.
Distribution in the form of rewards is too slow to matter very much. Over the next year approximately 20 million STEEM will be distributed in rewards (both content and curation rewards) and the total money supply will reach about 300 million. Under any conceivable scheme a very large portion of the 20 million will go to very large SP holders (including some who are successful posters as well). The only really significant redistribution that can possibly happen is though the market. I don't consider this a good reason to cut rewards for voting across the board, large and small alike, which is what cutting the size of the pool does.
Good question. I don't know of easy answers here. 95% of the stake is owned by roughly 1% of the users. There's no fast or painless way to spread that out. I guess time and confidence that things will work out longer-term is the best we can do.
I don't believe you are sharing your post key (of smooth) with your curator team. Are your referring teamsmooth?
I think we should push for a change where a user can delegate a percentage of their SP voting power to a user along with a percentage split of curation rewards. For example if you wanted to delegate 20% of your SP to 4 good curators, and keep 20% for yourself you could. You could start by giving them an 80/20 split, and increase their split percentage as a reward for doing a good job.
@clayop
The way it worked is the team members submitted candidate posts to me and I vote for them myself using the web site, as well as adding some of their identified authors to a list for automated voting. I received the rewards and paid the team members for their work from other funds (since rewards are SP and can't be transferred).
I was in the process of creating a different process using mulitple posting keys for the various team members when the economics shifted in a manner that discouraged further investment in curation infrastructure, so that work is on hold for now. I'm still accepting post recommendations and voting manually, though at a lower rate than previously (in part because the market has become much more competitive with multiple curation teams operating; I'm an investor and supporter of one of them).
I'm currently working on a new initiative with my curation team that should start going within the next few days. The process and curation goals will be slightly different than before, and more in tune with the current market.
If curation bring in more Steem owners and price goes up 1/3 it could be net postitive for authors.
I fully agree with @beanz. From the market site steem as investment doesnt look good with the inflation of at least 100% per year. Even if 90% is given back to Steem power holders, still the market graph looks going down for an outsider. The hyper inflation also destroys the incentive to use steem as currency or to provide liquidity.
Reduce steem inflation rate drastically
Therefore i would suggest to reduce the inflation of steem dramatically to 10% per year. 5% could go to steem power holders.
Reduce the time period you must hold steem power drastically
Also I would suggest to drastically change the time period that you must hold steem power to at max one year.
Give incentives for users that verify their identity
We should also think about giving incentives for new users that fully verify their identity. This could look like the following: If you verified your identity, you get 30% interest per month, until the value of your steem power equals 500 steem dollars.
Give incentives for using steem dollars to buy something
Also we should think about incentives for buying something with steem or steem dollars. For example you get up to 10% of the purchase price if you buy something from an verified steem merchant.
There is such way on traditional markets, they call it credit