How to fix the extreme inequality on steem
The problem
A lot of quality content and discussions go unnoticed and unrewarded (< $1 rewards with dozens/hundreds of upvotes). In the mean time, some people ("followed by the whales") are consistently rewarded thousands of dollars for anything they post.
Why?
Inequality. If only one or two whales follow someone (either by bots or manually), their posts will be consistently awarded hundreds of dollars and guaranteed visibility. At the same time, the vast majority of users' upvotes are worth so little (about $0.0001) that even hundreds of them don't add up to a single dollar.
Proposed solutions
We need to find ways to efficiently redistribute Steem Power. Rather than one user's upvote weighting $100, we want a thousand users' upvotes to be worth $0.1 each. Here are some ideas on how to achieve this:
1.
The whales need to stop following people. They should spend most of their time looking at the "new" or "hot" (which is influenced by the number of upvotes rather than their worth) pages. Look for posts with lots of upvotes and comments but little reward. These are usually worth discovering.
2.
We may want to introduce a ceiling for author rewards. That could help avoid bandwagon upvoting and posts reaching unrealistically high payouts. Let's be honest, no post is worth tens of thousands of dollars. Authors should be happy with a few hundred dollars tops. That means, the rest of the money would be spread out between more otherwise unnoticed content.
3.
The ability to assign a percentage weight to each of your upvotes is already implemented in the system. If this was available on the steemit.com interface, whales would have an easier time distributing rewards fairly. This way, even if a whales full upvote is worth say $100, they could use their voting power to reward a post with just $1, $10 or whatever they find reasonable.
4.
Rather than worrying about the spam bots whose comments can already be hidden by a single downvote, the community needs to actively find ways to redistribute steem wealth (for example, see my attempt here)
Summary
I would like see a better spread of rewards between more quality content and a better spread of voting power between more users. I believe something in the ballpark of a few hundreds bucks per top trending post and an average of about $0.1 per upvote would be feasible and desirable.
What do you think?
I can't edit anymore, here's one more point I forgot:
5.
Witnesses should significantly increase the account creation fee. This way new accounts would start out with more Steem Power, meaning their upvotes would be worth more. Currently, a new account with 3 Steem Power has an upvote value of $0.000157 at full vote power. By increasing the account creation fee to 20 steem, this value would increase to about $0.001. Setting the account creation fee to 200 steem would set the upvote value of new accounts to $0.01.
It is a good proposal but part of the redistribution of power, generated much controversy and discontent, I think not apply
Interesting, I think we're onto the same problem from but from slightly different angles. I've just written up my thoughts and suggestions about it:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@condra/high-reward-for-low-hanging-fruit-steemits-curation-problem-needs-to-be-fixed
;)
Seriously though, it's true. It seems like a lot of people would like to make things more fair around here, and there are many approaches that could be taken. I'm not sure I would support a cap in author earning potential, but I think the most important behaviour that needs to change is how people are voting. They are trying to game the system rather than being sincere.
I see what you did there ;)
But people are selfish and not willing to do the right thing without incentive. The question is, how would you incentivize the desired behavior then?
Firstly, well I'm not a mathematician. But ultimately my ideal Steemit system is not communism, but equitable, self deterministic meritocracy. If good work is to be rewarded, then people should be voting for the right reasons.
Secondly, I think Steemit needs to rebrand itself, away from "get paid to blog", to "Reddit with built in money that you may or may not be bothered using". (It's not snappy but you get my point) .. Two very different things, but the second one might attract those with lower monetary expectations.
But no user can ignore the economy of the platform, because content visibility is heavily tied to the rewards. Which is controlled by a few "whales" right now to an extreme extent.
Perhaps one option could be to lock more of the payments into long term SP? In that way the more successful authors would be investing their time into building the platform for the long term? Right now, the focus by many (not all!) people on the site seems to be 'how much cash can I earn and cash out'? It's inevitable I guess, but such a shame when this idea has so much more to offer.
It's the first time I've seen such an elegant, simple micropayment system at work on the Internet, which wasn't artificially funded (e.g. MP3.com) and hopefully it will do a lot to redress the appaling slow drift of the web or walled gardens towards kittens and trash.
While that would lock more people in the platform so to speak, I'm not sure how that would help with redistributing the power.
I agree that it's a very convenient micropayment platform though. It just makes me wonder how awesome the same thing could be if everyone's vote had an equal weight. Hell, I would even pay a monthly $10 subsciption if it allowed me to distribute 100 x $0.1 votes and granted me the opportunity to receive rewards for my content.
But here I would have to spend way more to have a noticable effect, because I would not only have to pay for the power I receive, but also indirectly for the power earlier investors (and the devs) received and continue to receive.
As with all these things, I think the problem with giving everyone equal weight is you give the bad actors a way to band together to game the system too easily. You will always need some form of admin/moderator/control function with open systems like this, surely? Letting some people pay to vote just opens up a new can of worms, since it disenfranchises those who can't afford the fees. It's tricky stuff, isn't it? :)
I think there are way more good actors than malicious ones. And the reputation system along with the power of the community is great for dealing with bad actors.
As for paying to vote: You can kind of already do that on steem. It just requires hunreds of dollars of investment to have even a $0.01 vote. And that's still pretty much nothing compared to the $300 votes of whale bots that make or break posts.
But yeah, it most definitely is tricky stuff :)
Идея в целом хорошая, но не надо забывать, что Steemit платформа сильно монетизирована. Поэтому о каком-либо справедливом распределении вознаграждений говорить не приходится. Голос одного Кита всегда будет весомее голосов сотен пескарей. Справедливее было бы ввести систему раздельной оценки рейтинга участников разных весовых категорий. Киты оцениваю китов, пескари формируют рейтинги в своем кругу.
Here's some more discussion on the topic with @rok-sivante
Good post. I agree. Interesting ideas for solutions, especially point 3!
Hi! This post has a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 6.8 and reading ease of 73%. This puts the writing level on par with Stephen King and Dan Brown.