LeoFinance has seen a lot of updates, changes and developments since the start of this year. More recently, we've gotten a lot more attention on our community and have been onboarding new users (on Hive and off of Hive) left and right.
While the fundamental developements - our new interface, new projects (i.e. LeoInfra), Uniswap listing, CoinGecko/CMC listings, etc. - keep chugging along, we also need to take a look internally at how our current rewards pool is valuing our authors and curators.
As it stands, the biggest issue with Proof of Brain - whether you look at Steem over the last 4 years or Hive or LeoFinance - is an issue of incentives.
Right now, autovoting is by far the most incentivized activity. For Hive, it means voting around 3 or 4 minutes to try and snipe the rewards before other votes come in after you.
On LEO, we don't have the reverse auction window for curation. This means that the current optimal time to vote is as close to 0 seconds as possible.
The incentive structure is geared toward autovoting. It's no wonder that Hive and LEO face major issues with too many autovoters and too little manual curators: you're incentivized to autovote because it's not only efficient for your time, it's also efficient because you actually earn more money as an autovoter.
Where does that "more money" come from? It comes from the manual curators who are actively adding value to the platform by spending their most valuable resource: time.
We're not here to talk down on people who autovote. It's clear that doing so is in your best personal interest but it is clearly not in the best interest of the platform. Nobody can blame anyone for doing what is in their best personal interest.
I've spent a lot of time talking with people and thinking about different curation setups. The primary question is:
How can we create a higher incentive for manual curation than autovoting?
In my mind, manual curation should be highly incentvized. Let's say that user x manually curates and user y autovotes.
We can all agree that user x adds more value to the platform by manually curating, but under the current structure, they are paid less rewards AND they're spending their time to manually curate good content.
Essentially, they are donating both time and money to the platform (and autovoters soak up the margins on both of these aspects by requiring 0 time and earning a % of the manual curators who vote after them).
You can see this on LEO and you can see this on Hive. Power users and curators like @theycallmedan manually curate on Hive even though it's not in their personal financial interest. He's giving up 10% or more of his curation rewards to autovoting frontrunners who add little-to-no value to the platform itself.
Flattening the Curve = Leveling the Playing Field
We have yet to come up with a great structure to make manual curation more beneficial than autovoting. What we can do, however, is flatten the curation curve.
What this means is that 1 upvote = 1 upvote = 1 upvote.
Under a flat curation curve, upvoting a post means that you get 50% of the value of your upvote and the author gets 50%. The curators who upvoted a post before you do not get any of your upvote.
So, if your upvote is worth 10 LEO, then you will get 5 LEO back when you upvote a post regardless of who voted that post before you.
This turns curation on its head. Instead of being a game to see who can vote the fastest on content that will get curated later on, it turns curation into a tipping economy. 1 Upvote = 1 tip. The value of which is determined by your LEO POWER (LEO that you have staked in your Hive account).
Right now, the top posts on LeoFinance look like this:
Again, this is not to call anyone out for autovoting. Autovoting is clearly in your best interest under the current setup. The earlier you can vote, the better for you personally.
While we haven't come up with a system to incentvize manual curators more from a financial perspective as opposed to autovoters (yet), we have come up with a way to level the playing field:
7 days from now, the flattened curve will take effect on all posts. This means that all posts upvoted from this post forward will be hit with a flat curation curve.
It means that manually curating will not be less financially beneficial than autovoting. Instead, the playing field (again, on a financial incentive level) will be equal.
Under this new structure, there is still a benefit to autovoting, but it is simply as a time saver and NOT as a way to earn higher rewards than manual curators:
- When you vote will not matter.
- Who votes before you will not matter.
- How much a post is paying out when you upvote it will not matter.
Your upvote = your upvote.
Manual curation will now earn the same amount as auto curation. The difference is in how you want to add value to the platform. Do you want to automatically earn rewards on your stake (again, nothing wrong with that) OR do you want to actively curate and add an immense amount of value to LeoFinance by properly rewarding good content rather than upvoting as close to 0s as possible for an optimal reward.
A Non-Event?
Again, we've been discussing the curation curve for weeks now in the Leo Discord (and some people have been discussing it amongst themselves even longer than that). So far, it's been unanmously in favor of flattening the curve.
LEO stakeholders want LeoFinance to succeed. Many of us are already manually curating because we know that manual curation is how you reward good authors who make great content.
This change only "negatively" impacts autovoting - although, it doesn't really negatively impact autovoting... It's simply taking away the rewards that would otherwise be earned by the manual curators who actively spend their time to add value to LeoFinance.
Autovoters will still earn the same as everyone else. Their upvote still = their upvote. This change just means that they won't earn MORE than everyone else.
Wrapping it Up In Simple Terms: How Does This Impact You?
A lot of users might be confused by the whole discussion over curation curves (I remember this back when the EIP was released on Steem not too long ago which changed the rewards curve and confused everyone because it was poorly discussed and even more poorly implemented).
With this flattened curve coming to the LEO token rewards pool, all you need to understand is that we're removing the "curation game" of upvoting before other people.
When you see your upvote value on a post, you will actually earn 50% of the value you see and will not give up any % of your rewards to people who autovote before you.
If you use autovoters, then you will probably notice a slight drop in your overall curation rewards. This is because your autovotes are no longer earning a piece of the rewards from people who upvote after you. Again, you still have an incentive to use this as a time saver, but now you won't be earning higher LEO rewards than people who decide to spend their time to curate good content.
If you have any questions about this change, please leave a comment below or ask anyone in the community directly on Discord or Telegram.
LeoFinance is a blockchain-based social media community for Crypto & Finance content creators. Our tokenized blogging platform (https://leofinance.io) allows users and creators to engage and share content on the blockchain while earning LEO token rewards.
| Track Hive Data | New Interface! | About Us |
|---|---|---|
| Hivestats | LeoFinance Beta | Learn More |
 |  |  |
| Trade Hive Tokens | Wrapped LEO | Hive Witness |
|---|---|---|
| LeoDex | Trade on Uniswap | Vote |
 |  |  |