Have you ever found a high-quality piece of content on Steemit that was past it's payout date, and made less than $1 in rewards?
Whenever I submit a new article, I try to curate at least a page of new, which is about 7 entries. This usually amounts to 1-2 plagiarized pornography clips, 1-2 cut-and-pasted news articles without attribution, 2-4 garbage posts and 1 arguably-OK but low-content post.
Occasionally, I find a gem of an article from an underappreciated author and decide to review their blog for a possible following.
When the author is good, the story is always the same - tons of articles under-rewarded, and no way to do anything but add a token upvote to the pile at 1%.
The truth is, there is a lot of great content on Steemit that was not successfully monetized the first time around. Why not allow posts to be revived/remonetized, in much the same was as a Resteem, under certain conditions?
The options for allowing or restricting this activity as much as the community deems fit are myriad:
- Payout of post.
- Age of post.
- Reputation of poster.
- Time limit - one post review per week, month, year etc.
- Listed by Steemit "Undervalued Posts" Tribune
- Maximum previous payout.
- Only allow reviving by non-authors, potentially based on the reviving account's age, reputation, or a minimum Curation Rep level, per my suggestions in parts 1 + 2.
- Restrict number of active revived posts by author.
- Cap on revives per article, based on previous payouts, number of revives, etc.
I know some will worry that this will lead to Steem being a sea of rehashed content, or the reward pool being monopolized by a set of highly popular authors. I think there are ample options to prevent this in my list of conditions above, but there is also a nuclear option.
Make revived posts appear in the "Promoted" tab (and potentially nowhere else). Steemit could even require a "revivification fee" equal to the post's last payout be burned via the Promoted interface (sent to @null.) This would both lower inflation for all Steem holders while also economically disincentivizing the repeat remonetization of popular or highly-paid posts.
Does anyone really look at promoted, now? I don't. Perhaps with a name and function change, the "Promoted" tab could become useful once again. Maybe we could change it to "Classics", "Community Favorites", or something with a more positive connotation.
Sources: TheOdyssey Online, Google, @gric, jrrny.com, Allmusic.com