In the past several weeks, there has been quite the furor over several proposed changes to the reward system in Steem. My post today is also about one of the proposed changes, but on a totally new topic, and one that has the potential to make some people angry. It also has the potential to make people some money and promote some good content, so read on.
Harkfork 17 will allow authors to buy votes directly with their author rewards.
I submit to you Issue #773, "Comment Reward Beneficiaries." This new feature will allow a post author to commit a portion of their post's rewards to any other account. My understanding is that it's designed to help organizations like @busy.org earn revenue, because a website like busy.org can require authors who use their platform to pay a "fee" in the form of a 10% commitment of author rewards. They'll say "you want to post with us? If you let us take a bit of your reward, we'll let you post with us!"
What else will this new feature allow? There has been an ongoing discussion lately about "how do you fund curation guilds?" @curie has continually had to deal with waning curation rewards; the bots of Steem discover what content Curie is voting on, and then vote first to take the rewards. Curie then ends up with less and less curation rewards to fund their operations. With the new feature, this discussion could go away. Now you fund them directly with author rewards. Let me walk you through how this will work with a simple example.
How paid-membership curation guilds might work
Once the new feature goes into effect, a new curation guild will be founded, let's call it Burie. Burie will sign up some whales who want to sell their voting power, and then they'll put out a call to new authors: "Commit a 20% portion of your author rewards to the @burie account, and then if we like your article, we'll commit to voting for you with our whale voting power."
This could come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from deeply pathological to richly beneficial. For starters, @curie should probably immediately update their model to take advantage of this feature. They can still enforce all their quality metrics, but now they'll actually make a living doing it and they won't have to anger the steemizens by self-voting to get there. This is where paid voting can be good and beneficial. They'd pitch the commitment of author rewards as a "review fee" or something like that; they wouldn't commit to voting on a post just because they were paid to look at it.
How could this go wrong? Well, the good news is that this probably won't ever be worse than simple self-voting by whales. Right now a bad whale could post a million comments, upvote all of them, and cash out a generous portion of author rewards. The shape of the reward curve disincentivizes this somewhat, but there's still money in it. @transisto recently did this here. If you look down at the comments on that article, he posted many comments and self-voted all of them for around a buck apiece. He didn't do this to be malicious, but the only way to make it go away completely is to get some other whales to flag the bad whale and remove his rewards.
In the context of splitting author rewards, now a bad whale could set up shop with a dumb bot that says "any account that commits at least 20% of author rewards to me will get an upvote." A couple of those upvotes will go to good content, but most will not. Most of the upvotes will be spent on garbage posts that are just looking to get a buck. How bad could this be? Well, not that bad - not worse than if the whale just set up the bot to post-vote himself 40 times per day.
Unintended consequence, perverse incentive, or undocumented feature?
The consequence of this new feature as it relates to voting is clear. Paid voting will certainly be possible, and will likely be a major part of steem in the next few months.
What is less clear is whether or not this will be bad. As I pointed out, this could be used for good by having the paid guild still enforce quality requirements on the votes they sell. It will put quite a bit of money into the pockets of anyone who can convince a whale to lease out some of his voting power. Will it lead to new, unpredictable, perverse consequences? Time alone will tell.
Note: My current voting bot will not have votes for sale. My clients signed up for autovoting, not for paid voting and I will respect that.
(image from pixabay)