I've been using @reward.app for a week or so now, some thoughts on this service and why I have been keen to give it a go. The announcement post and follow-up post are worth a read, as well as the comments in which there are some pretty cool ideas mentioned to expand on the service.
Beneficiaries have been around for a while now, and are a great way to share out author rewards to accounts. I've used them to reward people for their help with ENGAGE, as well as to send a little to the DAO. @reward.app is different as it is the future voters of a post which take a (configurable) share of the author rewards.
Below is my first payout from @reward.app, and in the memo is the amount shared to the curators of my post. I chose to share 10% of the author rewards to the curators, which ended up being 1.332 HBD and 5.844 Hive.
Although I read the announcement, follow-up post, and 'Liquified risk and reward' post from Taraz prior to using the service, I somehow missed:
When you write the post you just have to set @reward.app as 100% beneficiary and you'll automatically receive the rewards in liquid form at payout minus a 1% fee.
Ooops. What I expected to receive was the HBD and the HIVE as Hive Power, the normal payout when using 50/50. Anyway, I powered up the HIVE and made a mental note to speak to @acidyo when I returned from my holiday.
That time has now passed, and the suggestion I wanted to make was that the rewards should be paid in HBD and HP. My reasons for using the service were and still are:
- To pay me less because I do well enough
- To reward my curators more
The first point is a personal opinion, I've been told it's bs but I'm pretty stubborn and do read other (better) travel posts. Yes, I could set a cap on payout, or send a % to NULL/DAO, but that seems out of fashion at present and being able to set a custom author/curator share sounded pretty cool. More on why it might not be so cool shortly.
A comment on the first post that I used the service for, said in jest because there was no DV from this account, brings me on to another point and a post by @curangel not long after the announcement.
@curangel stated that:
the curangel upvote code was updated to prevent upvotes on posts that set a liquifying service as beneficiary.
Although I delegate to @curangel and vote their daily compilation posts, I do not expect a vote from a service which I believe is there to find newer authors putting out decent content.
So that's fine by me, apart from the fact that I have a lot of respect for the owner/manager of @curangel, and feel unsteady about being on the other side of their opinion:
While the existence of likwid has been unfortunate already, its use has been so small that having an own check for it didn't occur necessary. As reward.app "improved" on the concept by combining it with a vote buying mechanism, @curangel will step up early and work against these kind of schemes becoming the new normal.
With regards to likwid, I used the service on Steem for a few weeks while powering down. Unfortunately they got screwed with the account theft and so I lost a weeks worth of payouts in doing so. Using @reward.app for liquid rewards was never the plan.
The second point relating to vote buying I can see the argument for. It would not be hard for a coder to check which posts have set a beneficiary to @reward.app, check last memo to @reward.app which specifies the curator reward %, and auto-vote said content at a suitable time.
Also, an author might choose to highlight in the title or first lines of their post that they are using the service, and thus attract curators skimming the various feeds. Indirect vote buying?
As I said earlier, my goal was and still is to reward me a bit less and you at bit more, but it seems that it is more complex than that.
So, what do you think? Is a person using @reward.app buying votes?
Do you think the default payout should be HBD and vested HIVE?
And what if there was 'some kind of lottery, where for example a percentage of my rewards could be put aside and then be applied on a random post sometime in the future, but no one knows which post.', as stated by Taraz in a comment on announcement post. Would that be like indirect vote buying also?
I think I will continue to experiment with @reward.app but I'm keen to know if people think it's a good idea or not.
Cheers
Asher