There has been talk of returning to a 50/50 curation/payout split with some of the biggest accounts like @blocktrades and @berniesanders (who rarely agree on anything) leading the charge. Now it is very easy to feel like these whales are looking to take advantage of content creators and take food out of the mouths of the artists. How greedy can they be, they didn't do the work?
Edit: adding a post and discussion from Blocktrades. The comments are very interesting to read.
My father was a fairly well-known artist, an acrylic on canvas painter who was able to get sponsorship to emigrate from Malaysia to Australia during white-only policy times in the 60s. No easy feat. Once there, he had to get a real job. Being an artist, even an accomplished one, just didn't pay the bills and the return of hundreds of hours of painting work per piece was much less than the steady income from employment.
I loved the show Californication and the character of Hank Moody, the witty, ladies-man who each episode would find himself in another messed up situation, generally in the arms of a beautiful woman at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Ah, the romantic life of a professional writer. Fat advances and glamour. Sometimes.
Last night I was researching a little bit on the earnings of a writer (yes, occasionally I do research) and was surprised to find even my low expectations were not low enough. From the article I will take a quote but I do recommend that you read it all for detail.
So let’s do some quick math here: Let’s say you get a $5,000 advance for your book and you get 10% royalties net profit, and the book’s list price is $25.00. That means you are making $1.25 per book, and that you will need to sell 4,000 copies of your book just to break even. Thus the averages say that you will never make a penny from royalties off sales of your book (earn out). The average US non-fiction book sells about 250 copies a year and around 3,000 copies over its lifetime.
Now, this is for professionals who have enough trust that the publisher will offer any advance at all. An advance is just that, a loan that must be paid back. Typically, the publisher will be getting profits from 50 percent of the list price but they must do the work of editing, binding, marketing and distribution. It is no wonder they push electronic versions. Once one factors in the time commitment, being an author is not necessarily all it is cracked up to be and there aren't many JK Rowlings or George R. R. Martin's in the pack.
I am glad that it is not this way at Steemit.
We may feel that it is unfair that someone profits from our blood, sweat and tears, our hopes and dreams and our creations that pour forth from the heart, but the relationship is symbiotic, it is a partnership. We create, they invest. We earn something which attracts more creators, they make something which attracts more investors.
Actually, they need not vote on quality content at all for a return, they could just vote on random spam and get the same or self-vote their cut-and-paste comment 'Greed' over and over yet, they do not. Why? They are investors. They realise that if the creator/investor relationship is unbalanced, the health of the platform will decline to a point it is untenable. Getting this balance right is an ongoing negotiation and will shift many times in the future.
A 50/50 split may not be it but a 25/75 split is not working either as it encourages vote selling (read the interesting post by @themarkymark about curation returns here) so something else must be attempted, at least in the short-term until a more robust solution is found. If the balance isn't found, the creators leave or the investors leave and this is not in the best interest of anyone.
How I see the split of 50/50 is one of quiet optimism because I have the (potentially deluded) idea that if this happens, there is actually more reason for curators to find decent content as it 'really' does support the platform. I am not proud, I do not gloat but, I work my keister off and do all I can to develop various streams of content that I think will add value to the platform and the community within.
My hope is that with a 50/50 split, the paid voting bots will disappear or evolve, the spam can be heavily flagged and some of the voting behaviours change to leave more in the pool for quality content. Does my content qualify, I do not know but I know there is a lot of content that doesn't. I cannot sing, yet I can still hear when someone else can't hold a note. And this brings us to the fear.
The reason I support more return for curators is that I understand that without them my work is for me alone, there is no fiscal value. But, I don't fear this as I stand behind my work and at the bottom of each piece, I put my name. Here it is, my work for electronic eternity on the blockchain. I am not Tolkien, but if in a hundred years someone chances upon the Steemit archives, will they find me and say, 'Here's another shitposter doing it for rewards' ? I don't think so.
The fear others have is 'What if my work isn't good enough?' A very real fear is it not? Worrying about whether what comes from within is going to be accepted by the audience, applauded, condemned or criticised. Who are you creating for again? If you are doing it for yourself, you have nothing to fear, if you are doing it for the money, you better bring your A-game, if you want a blend of both, you better work hard for it, honey.
So, I trust that those big and small investors with voting power will support me because I do what I can to support them. I see massive potential for the Steem blockchain and therefore the value of Steem which means, the more creators and investors support each other, the more future value for everyone. If greed overweighs on either side, the platform topples.
Steemit is still in its infancy and all of the suggestions, discussions and actions are relatively easy to have, implement and change if harmful to the platform, not just for some actors within. The actors must evolve and help it grow, which means understanding the ecosystem, not just their little corner of it. This goes for creator and investor alike. I am lacking in many necessary areas, but I am learning.
The balance is not yet found but the willingness to keep searching is.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
nice to read
what's the harm if it encourages people to upvote more? I know it sounds unfair, the problem is the spam and not how the reward is distributed. the more people benefit from curating the more they participate in it.
The balance or perfect equilibrium will probably never be exactly pinpointed. However, I agree with your views and also those of the mentioned whales. Right now, we expect every non-whale Steemian to be a content creator, since blogging creates the biggest rewards at the moment.
However, human behavior on other blog platforms is different, there is more 'lurking' and silent upvoting. And that would be the normal situation here as well, I would think. So incentivizing good curation (for example by settings the rewards at 50/50 split) would be a natural way to reduce the amount of low quality posts and promote good curation. When you are incentivizing behavior with monetary rewards, you will usually get the behavior that's most rewarded.
Don't get me wrong, Steem as it is promotes and challenges everyone to be as creative as possible. Steem got me to try blogging for the first time in my life, to code a little bit, to try out photoshop and is now challenging me to write songs and perform them on camera. Stepping out of your comfort zone can be scary, but this incentive on trying creative things is really awesome. And yes, compared to artists that dominate other parts of the internet, my content is actually pretty crappy. I probably won't ever get 100K viewers on a youtube channel or anything like that, so for me it's cool that Steem is what it is right now.
But, I still feel that although I have explored quite some activities here, I still haven't done the one thing that would really contribute massively to the quality of the content here: CURATION. I have very little SP and it simply isn't rewarding, compared to the time it would consume. Especially with the amount of mediocre content here, it's a long, tedious and tiresome chore. The real heroes of this platform are the curators in my view, so anything that enhances good curation is something I would support whole-heartedly.
Sorry for the long comment. But hey, at least I read your post first :)
I have to run out the door very soon, i will get back to your comment later :)
cool
This would definitely be one of the hopes. There are always unknown side-effects (good and bad) of changes to the way things work but, it doesn't mean that change is bad.
I agree. The platform definitely supports people to try a range of things out with very little downside but plenty of up. The return on the platform is asymmetrical and factoring in future value of Steem, it could prove very lucrative too.
Your dad sure knew his way around a paintbrush.
That coastal scene at Galen's is incredible.
It's important to note that 50/50 was the original setting; it was changed experimentally during beta, so a return to 50/50 would hardly be breaking new ground.
Markymark's post pointed out how little curators actually make; so even a 50/50 split would probably run to 65/35 in practice.
I've been pushing for this since just after hf19.
Really happy to see some wind in its sails.
Yes, it is a brilliant work and there are so many different styles he painted through. He was very talented.
Yeah, I don't think anyone is going to rush through this but it is good to get some momentum to at least keep investigating options.
We're still in beta :)
you know.. there are a lot of people and groups who spend a lot of time curating, real curating not racing to vote curating, without regard to curation rewards. They are the people who will bring the good content to light.
I am more in support of @meesterboom who went out on a limb and suggested the elimination of curation rewards to stop the vote selling.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@meesterboom/thinking-out-the-box-curation-rewards
Elimination of curation rewards would not stop the vote selling. Vote selling is a direct monetization of the voting power (where the voting party receives some or all of the expected author rewards in advance of their vote). Since it's a dutch auction style format each voting round, the price of upvotes is actually set by the buyers.
Increasing the curation rewards will decrease the amount vote buyers are willing to bid for upvotes. Since the curation portion of the bid-bot revenue model is much less dependable than the buyer bid (and would continue to be undependable after a move to 50/50), increasing curation rewards would actually decrease the profitability of bidding bots, encouraging voting power and delegation to move to actual curation.
you forget that those groups that do a good job (like @ocd and @curie) are incentivised to do so. They are employees and their pay comes from curation return.
I read the suggestion when he posted, it won't work as it means the curators can't grow, only the content creators. It is a lopsided argument that doesn't consider the ecosystem as a whole.
Nice read!
One of the most beneficial change in the rules proposed is this one in my opinion:
That really makes sense when you think about it. I think Steem's core is good, it just needs a little fine tuning!
Also, would it kill Steemit to factor in some kind of rewards beyond the current 7 day period? Some content that gets on here sells off for very cheap. Others less so.
Enjoyed the read, by the way.
Yes, I think that this alone will help some matters so is a very good (and easy) starting point.
They will most definitely not disappear, au contraire. Because of the lowered rewrpards for creators, they will operate at a lower cost, but possibly even with a higher profit margins since they themselves will get a higher amount of curation rewards. Add to that the fact that they also suggest to do away with the reverse auction and bots can come immediately and claim the majority of all rewards again, completely without any penalty.
For the health of the platform, and community, it is the most shortsighted idea which could only come from
emotionslarge stakeholders/operators who whether want as fast and as much ROI as possible or briefly lost it.The sad thing tho is that this is a very high stakes game and could become Governance. At which point short term vision will have ruined the platform.
Steemit started off with 50/50 stake, and changed to 75/25. What was the reason for the original switch? Can we take those lessons learned and apply them to the current environment?
I think before we go back to what existed initially, and was subsequently changed, we need to understand all of the reasons why the payouts were changed to begin with and consider if that will happen again and we should be looking at a different lever to pull as opposed to adjusting the author/curation rewards.
I wasn't around at those days but remember that there were 30,000 dollar payouts also. The system was altogether out of balance.
hahaha.. try to read it firts..
i don't know much about this platform, but I do agree with 'We earn something which attracts more creators, they make something which attracts more investors".
just focus at californication point! that guy have a very nice life. spending time almost every day with different girl.. completely different with who have very hard work and earn a little wage. pathetic!
After reading your post my worry become way less thanks, now I'd be more satisfied than I would be
whenif the 50/50 reward split returned.nice post brother.
Try reading it first.
lol
Truth never damages a cause that is just.
- Mahatma Gandhi