RE: Proposed Upgrade for Blockchain Incentives
Comments should not have curation rewards because those who are reading have already found the discussion by other means.
I don't agree with this. The problem is that it directly disadvantages voting on comments. I'm currently donating some of my vote power to an initiative with a mission to vote on comments. I fully expect that curation rewards on comments will (usually) be less than those on posts (since rewards are typically lower), so there is some opportunity cost here, but I don't expect the rewards to be zero, and if they were I would be less likely to allow my vote power to be used on comments.
Secondarily, it isn't necessarily true that curating good comments doesn't require significant effort nor add significant value. Consider very active comment streams with thousands of comments or more (for example on reddit it not uncommon that a single post generates far more comments than there are recent posts in the same sub). Voting up the most insightful, entertaining, etc. comments can be both non-trivial effort and add a lot of value.
I'm not sure about the ideas for segregating of content types. It seems rather arbitrary and static. What about video sharing, photo sharing, microblogging, etc.? The point being there are many different types of content (including some not yet invented) and even if the splits are open to witness vote, the categories in this proposal seem hard coded and arbitrary. I'd prefer to see something where rewards flow dynamically to whatever content types generate the most user engagement. I don't have a specific proposal for that however.
I think it actually requires more effort and work to curate comments. I think the rewards should be kept. It may not be an incentive right now but in the future with a higher Steem price it will become more relevant. The discussion is just as important as the posts and curation should be encouraged. I like the other ideas though.
I agree that curation rewards for comments should remain.
Regarding the segregation of content types, I think it could make sense to separate reward streams for top-level posts versus comments since there is a distinction made between the two at the blockchain level (the payout times for comments is entirely driven by the payout time for the root post). So this blockchain difference means that comments (posts with depth level greater than 0) should really just be used as commentary on top-level posts rather than other purposes, and so their visibility is expected to be very different than top-level posts that it can perhaps justify a segregated reward stream. (By the way, this proposed hard fork is a good time to finally get rid of the 4 post limit on full payouts. Then posts can be used for microblogging without limitations, and we don't need hacks like using comments on unrelated root posts for microblogs.)
But like you, I don't really like further hard-coded segregation of content types, such as the one between "original content" posts and "link" posts. I think those should just come from the same reward stream. However, I do see value in different types of content having a different percentage of the payout allocated to the post going to author rewards versus curation rewards. People are willing to reward the author of original content more than just a shared link. In fact, in the case of the shared link, the author of the post is really more like just another curator, so perhaps what would be ideal is to distribute all (or nearly all) of the payout to the curators for shared link posts (and the author would of course be the first curator). For original content, the author deserves a large fraction of the payout, but they should still give some fraction of it to curators to keep sufficient motivation for curators to upvote the post in the first place.
So, I suggest that the only segregation of reward streams be between posts versus comments, but to furthermore allow the author of a post/comment to specify the percentage of the payout that goes to the author (with a hardcoded maximum allowable percentage of say 80%) and the rest going to the curators. This percentage would be visible on the post so that it can inform the decision making of curators. And once again, get rid of the 4 post limit.
This does not make a lot of sense to me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it.
I somewhat like the idea of allowing a variable split, except for the issue of cognitive load. Display of it should probably be some sort of advanced/optional feature. People who are just voting for what they like and not trying to be professional curators should not be pressured to care about curation reward details with visual clutter. Either way that's not a blockchain issue though.
Absolutely 1000% agree with getting rid of the 4 post limit.
My mistake. I meant to write 80% (as in minimum 20% goes to curators). I fixed my post now. Does it make sense now?
Yes, I worry about the cognitive load too. Perhaps displaying it by default isn't so important because of the minimum going to the curators. Perhaps by default it could just use some icon to indicate whether: curators get the hardcoded minimum percentage of payout for this post; curators get 100% of the payout for this post; or, custom payout for curators (hover over icon to see detailed percentage).
I think I like the idea of 3 separated pool rewards. At least 2 separated pool for posts and comments the way @arhag propose really seems to make a lot of sense. I'll be awaiting more tinkering, details and comments to make a better opinion of those proposals.
Also I'm not sure I understand the statement below. If comments don't have curation rewards then what will be the incentives to vote for those comments?
What @smooth said is a no brainer in my opinion.
@smooth the problem that voting on comments dilutes your voting power can be solved through using Segregated voting power for each category per user.
Generally i love the idea of having segregated reward funds. Because this could evolve to a kind of virtual nation / federation.
Which categories are used and their percentage of the the reward funds should not be set in stone. Instead users should be able to vote on it. For example a change would need 2/3 positive votes over a period of 1 month.
The number of changes per time period should also be limited to avoid change suggestion spamming. For example each month only the top voted 5 changes with 2/3 positive votes are taken. This number itself could be voted on the same way.
The same way voting could also be done on the curation percentage in an category. So @smooth could vote for a smooth comment curation payout :)
So what about if we had two voting powers, one for comments, and one for everything else. Voting on comments would not effect your voting power for everything else where you could earn curation rewards, but would decrease your comment voting power (to keep comment rewarding fair)?
This way voting on a comment would not be a wasted vote, but something extra that you can choose to do with out losing out on curation rewards. Aka make it so there is no reason not to vote on comments.
Interesting idea!
I might not be understanding it 100% correctly, but it sounds like they are thinking of letting each platform decide on how to allocate the rewards for the content generated through their site. You could end up with sites that decide to pay comment curators 75% if they decided that was a good model for the type of site/community they wanted to create.
OK that would be better. I thought they were going to take away curation rewards for comments.