It might feel like we're going backwards with this proposal, but since Hardfork 17 is being delayed I figured this gives me another chance to make my case for rewarding comments known.

Thanks @jacor for the image lol

What makes steemit valuable?

All social media platforms thrive on the attention economy. The attention economy is the consumption of attention which is a limited resource. The media consumes a large portion of our attention nowadays. It started with TV advertising, because that's how advertisers could reach us in our homes, now with the internet on our phones, they reach us everywhere we go, even when we take our phones to bed with us. The attention economy isn't just advertising, it is everyone and anyone who wants your attention and includes those who are willing to pay for it!

image source

Facebook even started charging its users who run a Facebook Page to reach their already established followers.

People, small businesses and corporations are all buyers of your attention. Unfortunately, they don't pay you, they pay the content producer that you give your attention to for free.

Steem Comments

Theoretically, STEEM commenting threads could be embedded across the web on many other social media platforms. Imagine what this could do for STEEM. Now imagine, that these comments don't really get rewarded very much, because steem power holders spend most of their time on steemit where they can maximise their curation rewards. On top of that, since there could be 1000 times as many comments as there are steemit posts, these rewards are spread out extremely wide. The whole point of separating the comment reward pool from the post reward pool is to ensure that commenters are paid for their valuable attention - attention proven to be valuable by the people who invest in social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. I think that the main issue we are having with taking a pay cut from the reward pool is that our generation of bloggers believe that it is US who should get paid for our followers attention.

Where will STEEM investors come from?

@dan-atstartlite tells you here in his vlog that it is your followers attention that investors want, not yours.

If steemit is ever to become the next big social media platform that we all want it to be, it will need to have an engaged community. Facebook lost a lot of engagement to advertising, but people are so stuck in their ways that they still make capital from their advertising revenue.

What if people were being paid to get engaged?

Who would that attract to invest in steemit?

What we have now are not real investors. (no offense guys) They are not here to purchase your attention. The real steem investors will come from marketing companies who want the attention not just of bloggers, but content consumers (readers or viewers! There are not enough bloggers in the world! But everybody is a content consumer and when we consume content, they consume attention.

Can you imagine the potential growth of steemit if those consumers were getting paid to engage?

Bot Problem

Yes, there is the issue of spam and leaches and bot comments. These issues will have to be addressed. Currently we have a system of downvotes which is under constant scrutiny. My hope is that the developers will realise these flag-wars and arguments will but can't go on forever and address the issue by coming up with a more loss resistant voting system such as this one by proposed by @demotruk. Giving an author the power to remove rewards from their own commenters could help but wouldn't solve the issue completely.

Curation Rewards

Yes, they would take a cut. Why? Because curating comments for profit is much too easily gamed. When I first read the comment reward proposal for Hardfork 17, I just assumed automatically that comments wouldn't include curation rewards, because there's really nothing to "curate". The comments remain within the post. However, it wasn't made clear in the @steemitblog post and @krnel was one of the first to protest the potential abuse. I was relieved when I saw on github that the intention was to remove the curation rewards, which would give commenters a greater sized reward pool.

This is because that reward pool will pay FAR MORE writers than our post reward pool will. Their rewards, even at 38%, will always be low!

This is a screenshot from the last post I wrote about this.

Have you noticed since @smooth and @abit started their whale vote negation experiment there has been increased activity on steemit?

I can't say for sure that the experiment is the cause or correlation, but lets say that it could be! It's possible and it's my belief that having more power in your own vote, is very encouraging to users to get engaged. Not only do we feel good getting a reward, but giving a reward (and not having to take it straight from our own pocket) can be equally rewarding!

For that reason I think smaller voters having more power over the comment reward pool, because of whales lowered incentive to vote for comments would have a very positive impact on the platform. Remember these minnows don't get curation rewards - so this does not remove the incentive to power up or lower the demand for steem!

Summary

Steemit isn't all about rewarding bloggers. It isn't all about rewarding curators either. It is a combination of all forms of attention, which makes up an ATTENTION MARKET! Worrying about losing a portion of STEEM from the reward pool is hysterical in my eyes, because the value of that steem is completely speculative. The chances of that STEEM being valuable to a non-blogger / curator are slim if there isn't a way to pay the readers that the real investors would pay to reach.

With the words of @dan-atstarlite, please reflect on this idea of cutting the reward pool so that our most valuable asset - the readers - can be retained!

Justification for comment reward pool without curation rewards