RE: Improved Curation Rewards are Still a Necessity
I am definitely on board with this. As I've noted in the past, I'd really like authors to be able to set the curation rewards on a per-post basis, but that's probably not realistic any time soon, so I see 50/50 as a feasible alternative. Especially factoring in your closing point about ease of implementation and fall-back.
IMO, the bottom line is that the blockchain is incentivizing too much low quality content production and not enough content discovery. And beyond the quality of content that is being produced, authors also have no incentive to HODL. The author's incentive is to harvest and dump. Voters are the ones with the long term incentive. And just as a matter of human attention, if you have quality content, you'd probably expect to see most blockchain consumers spending more of their time reading (and voting) than writing. Having a reward ratio that skews in favor of authors just seems sub-optimal in a variety of ways.
If, as I suspect, we need a higher ratio of voters/authors, we almost certainly need to move the curation rewards in a direction that will attract voters and encourage authors to do more voting and holding. I'm amazed at how frequently I look at the wallets of successful authors who have been here for years and see relatively small amounts sitting there.
Your point about people changing their behavior is valid, and with steem power delegation, the response of bidbots is an especially big unknown, but speaking for myself - at least initially - higher curation rewards would encourage me to shift more of my steem power to manual voting and less to my bots.
I’m in favor of a sliding scale, but as I’m sure I’ve said to you in the past, I think we need a baseline that’s much higher than we currently have. It’s also much easier to change a couple of lines of code to implement the 50/50 protocol.
Yep. Favoring, by protocol, those with no desire or little incentive to invest in the system does more damage to long-term sustainability than I think most people realize. A consistent flow of value out of the system can’t possibly help grow the system.
I get that bloggers want to be paid for their efforts, but I also understand that how this money is acquired and dumped - and the amounts that are acquired and dumped - is hard to overcome without constant new investment. If we can adjust both the incentive to power up and reduce the percentage of rewards that are paid in liquid tokens to users who have no desire or need to invest, then the overall “fiscal health” of the blockchain should improve.
Same here. And I would be much happier with that arrangement. I don’t want to delegate my SP, but the lack of incentives have driven me to do it. I held out as long as I could.