How many people from outside of steem do these book chapters attract? Not enough for the reward paid, ask @jerrybanfield how many people 115$ of advertisement on facebook can bring to Steemit.
If you want to finance the production of these books without oversight from the community you're free to send your own Steem/SBD directly to the author's account.
Effort and originality of content has little to do with content's ability to bring viewership to the platform.
Well, clearly you have a different vision for the platform, and as I said, it's your prerogative to curate for that vision with votes and flags. I guess I'm just confused about what it is.
Did these particular authors attract me to Steemit in the first place? No. But their work is a tremendous part of what keeps me coming back. If all I saw on here were articles about crypto-currency trading and meta-posts analyzing the politics of Steemit, I'd just have written this place off as a scam and concluded it had nothing to offer for my time and attention. I happen to love reading serialized fiction in among the other news and articles. It's a tradition that extends back to Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, and it's still enjoyable today.
I don't understand the comment about @jerrybanfield. Are you saying that you feel that large payouts should be reserved for people whose content brings in new viewers, and people who are willing to invest US dollars to advertising in their efforts to do so? If that's the case, what are new viewers meant to read and enjoy once they arrive here?
As far as "oversight from the community," I thought that's what we were doing by voting with our stake. By voting for the content we enjoy, we encourage the production of more of what we enjoy. This seemed like an elegant means of oversight, to me.
I see, for example, that the vast majority of votes to these accounts come from the @blocktrades account. I'm not sure if it's an individual or a business behind that account's votes. Is your issue with the fact that this quite substantial account is consistently voting for the same few users on a regular basis, and that someone with that kind of influence is distributing their stake of the reward pool without oversight?
I'm genuinely trying to understand your position here. I think that if I (and a lot of the other writers who have expressed concerns here) saw more clearly what it was, we might even potentially agree with it. If you explained it in previous posts, could you perhaps provide a link to them?
You've clearly invested a lot of time on this platform, and I think we can agree we'd like to see Steemit grow into something we can all enjoy and perhaps even profit from.
What I'm trying to say is that the reward will eventually have very little to do with the cost of creating content. There is no cost to consume content so if you think the author will stop producing what you like without the reward from steem inflation then you should fund the work directly via transfers. The reward is either meant to be paid (not received) to promote content or as a reward for posting (not necessarily producing) content that people want to see / or think will attract people on Steem.
At the end of the day it would be my personal opinion to not want to see that kind of content anywhere near the trending page but given my stake I fell the responsibility to explain my long term vision and voting strategy.
This whole conversation prompted be to do this : https://steemit.com/promo-steem/@transisto/bring-a-steemit-com-post-to-1-daily-rank-of-reddit-com-r-bitcoin-or-r-cryptocurency-and-earn-500-sbd-big-votes