RE: A guide to curation incentives on the Steem blockchain
I was thinking about this post while I was taking a walk this morning, and I wondered if it would make sense if there was some way to upvote off-chain content. Right now we have a network effect problem in that unless both the content creator and audience are on-chain they won't connect. If the chain was already very popular then a network effect creates lock-in so it can be beneficial, but since that hasn't happened yet we have a problem where a creator looks here and doesn't see many people that would support them and fans look here and don't see many creators they want to support, so there's a chicken-and-egg problem. But right now 50% of the rewards are supposed to be about curation anyway, so maybe it would make more sense to allow people to "curate" content that doesn't exist on-chain so that they could develop reputations as people that can identify good content, and it could have the side-effect of showing creators what they could get rewarded for if they posted on-chain. I'm sure I haven't thought through all the implications yet, but I thought this was an interesting idea to ponder.
Excellent idea, although I'm not exactly sure of the mechanics of it, I do like it. A lot.
I guess maybe you could have a "stub" post on Steem that links back to the original post, and sends rewards to a dedicated account that keeps track of the source web sites, then when funds accumulate to a certain vaule invite the original publisher to register and claim their rewards in a similar way to what Brave does. The main challenges I see would be funding and compliance with intellectual property concerns.
We have a start in that direction, maybe, in the Steem Links community. I also remember a while back - before the market downturn and need for layoffs, @ned was talking about implementing a Disqus-like service so that blog owners could continue posting wherever they were, but enable commenting on Steem. I think both of those could help alot with the chicken-and-egg problem that you point out.
That would be a full-featured implementation, but it has the problems you mentioned plus needing a trusted third party to hold onto those funds. But what I was thinking is that if the "stub" post doesn't get any author rewards (maybe this is as simple as setting beneficiary to null?) then we sort of sidestep the complex ownership issues and curation rewards can still flow to people for finding good stuff, we get 50% of the benefit -- off-site creators can't swoop in and claim rewards, but they could at least see "here's what you would have gotten if you had posted it on the chain", but people who liked the content would at least get curation rewards around it and have a reason to have powered-up steem even if their favorite creators aren't on the chain (yet).
Good point. You're right that centralization is another challenge. Brave managed it, so as long as it's managed by a reputable business, it would probably be OK, but I wonder if it could be decentralized with the use of some sort of a wrapped STEEM token and an oracle like justlink. I'm not familiar enough with oracles to really have any idea bout that.
Along the lines of your idea of burning rewards, we once had a Share n burn community, but it never really took off, and it totally died after all the drama in March or whenever it was. In addition to sharing links here, it would be good if there was also some way to complete a handshake by letting the original author know that their content had been shared.