Agreed.
There are already enough impediments to getting people onboard, let alone retaining them, without some of the 'unnecessary' social issues. It's hard to make the pitch around the community during enflamed fights.
Like you said about holding SP, some may just enjoy having the influence, at least for a while. I'd have to suspect at some point it would need a return on their money whether through curation, increased steem price or some other method. But I'm not an investor myself so it's hard for me to say I fully understand their viewpoint.
I had tried the curation game in the past, usually getting 4-6 steem a week. It was fun for a while just to try it out, but eventually I preferred to just vote on what I wanted, typically voting on stuff that already had a payout enjoying seeing it tick up more on their earnings.
Some of the HF17 changes I'm curious to see the effect of include:
- the the single 7 days payout period, which ideally gives time for posts time to get seen by more people as well as the effect this has on the trending page. Some may not like waiting a week for payouts though, even if it doesn't really bother me personally.
- comment curation rewards: it's hard to really tell if these were there before and being left in or if this is new. Either way, I'm happy to see them put in or at least utilized more.
- change in curation reward formula that is supposed to reduce rewards for piling onto the same post/comment with other whales
- Really happy to see the comment nesting limit removed, even if it makes a mess of the UI for now. This has been a big frustration at times.
I know there are other things, but those are the bigger ones I'm eager to see the effects of.
Yep, comments will be paid exactly 7 days from the post's posting time. I'm not positive if posts themselves can have time extended like they currently do on the first payout.
I do expect to see the UI not handle the unlimited nesting well when they get deep. But even if not ideal, I'd prefer it this way than trying to track down what comment replied to what. I'd expect there to be a push to clean the UI a bit after seeing what it does on this one.
Good point on the downvoting bots. There are some others that had been doing that as well (maybe still going, I quite following after a while) that ended up prompting changes to the notification showing flag systems. Overall, while I understand the annoyance and detriment these can have to new users, most are little more than a nuisance, having little SP. Iflagtrash however is a bit larger account in comparison, where it can actually have more influence on payouts.
I will say on these downvote bots is that a big piece of frustration is most users (often) not being given an idea of why they are being flagged, at least explicitly. Even though I'm sure there is some reason (since most people would by default take a chunk of steem just to devote to flagging,) it doesn't always fix the issue by doing it this way. However, I have seen 'upvote' bots created in the past to directly offset certain downvote bots.
While ideally we could use our words instead of flags in scenarios like these, often it's either an emotional response from the bot owner or they are fed up after long strings of arguments. However, overall I can't claim to know the criteria being used to be put on these downvote bot lists. Really though in my eyes, iflagtrash would be the only one with a 'meaningful' effect to be concerned with.
I tried a bit to retitle it, but after a while, I really just wanted to finally hit submit. Lol. But I'm still trying to think of replacement for what I've got, sure I'll edit it once one comes to mind.