I know I contributed to the thread you are referring to. As a professional writer, having residual income is gold. Even if it's only a few cents a month, over time, the steady stream of income makes the ups and downs of the writing life livable.
The problem I have with content not getting paid more than twice is two fold. First, it's not what was going on when I got here and I saw that residual as a huge draw. I understand why it might not have been in the forefront of your thinking. That's neither here nor there, just a preference.
The second is more troubling for me. That is the fact that the system keeps my content in perpetuity, where it can be used in the future, long after I may have left the platform for greener pastures. It adds to the organic gravity of Steemit as a URL, and thus is contributing to the bottom line, since over 14% of the sites traffic is coming through content searches.
That means that as a writer, I am contributing to every new signup, every share, and every time the site comes up in search, because my work adds authority to the pool.
I understand that my SP grows with the site and in some sense, if things go well, I do get a continuing source of revenue, but that content may essentially be dead to me now.
With writers, our content is what we build to sell. Much of it gets sold for one money, one time, and that kind of work we have to continually seek and do. The other, more valuable kind provides streams of residual income, like I said, albeit small, they add up quickly.
A writer like myself contributing 4 pieces per day would have over 200 pieces of "property" on the site. Not all of them would produce continued upvotes, but many could. If 1/4 of them produced $1 in revenue per month, that is $50 per month, compounded over 5 years, that's $250 per month and if I develop my audience correctly, I can do much better. If I hit at 75% continuous revenue generation, that would mean $150 a month after the first year. Coupled with the immediate payouts and investment potential, this makes your platform a very attractive home for writers, who might never need go anywhere else if they can develop enough of a following.
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The primary reason to freeze discussions was both technical (reduce the memory footprint) and economic (prevent bots from "mining" their old content for rewards). Some potential changes we are discussing internally might address the economic reasoning behind this decision. I will be sure to bring that up during one of our brainstorming sessions.
Well, then prevent bots from mining. but don't penalize creators to stop something bad.
If we had a magic "stop bots" button, we would use it on a lot of things. Every change we make impacts human and bot users, usually in different ways. As conditions change we have to continually re-evaluate how our decisions, both past and present, effect both groups of users. If a past decision we made to reduce bot actions is now adversely effecting human users we will re-evaluate the past decision and change it if need be.
I'm not about telling anyone what to do, merely pointing out that the writers who are moving in and setting up camp are calculating their move based on long term, even micro, monetization of content. That won't be possible,according to Dan's reply above. That's unfortunate, since the content doesn't disappear, leaving a free version of my work, easily accessible making it difficult to monetize in other platforms as well.