The curation system in Steem was designed and intended to motivate post discovery by rewarding those who discover great posts early - perhaps more than they would be rewarded by writing their own posts... The danger is that if curation rewards are not accessible enough, those with the most stake in SP will be motivated to not only fail to seek/reward good content from others, but will actively discourage good content by only upvoting themselves and selling their votes - removing the checks and balances - plus, inspiring great authors to post on other networks.. Will the new hard fork 20 resolve this?
In the recent steemit blog update about Hard Fork 20 a change to the current curation system was described as follows:
With the current blockchain rules, if authors vote for themselves right away, they get their author rewards, plus 100% of the curation rewards from their vote, plus a portion of the curation rewards coming from everyone who votes for the post after them. Any other curator voting at the same time as the author would get 0% of the curation rewards. This gives the author an unfair advantage over other curators, because the author can earn additional curation rewards through self-voting.
In order to eliminate this advantage, the unused portion of the curation rewards will be returned to the rewards pool instead of being awarded to the author, thereby increasing the overall percentage of rewards that will be paid to curators. This will better serve the original mission of the curation rewards budget: to ensure that the Steem blockchain distributes rewards to the most valuable content.
This description of an aspect of the situation/challenge gives the impression that the proposed change not only prevents unfair advantage to self upvoters but also benefits curators in general since the reduction in benefit to self voters will result in greater payouts to curators in general, which in turn promotes actual curation of good posts.
What IS clear is that many users of Steem view their holding of Steem Power as little more than an entry point into making more profit for themselves and have no interest in actually finding 'good' content that makes it to the top of the trending lists and thus draws the interest of visitors to the site, attracts investment and grows Steem organically. In other words, the short term interest of Stake holders often wins out over the long term vision that may result in an overall greater return for them and certainly would result in a better platform and product for all.
As long as curation is less profitable than selling votes or using voting strategies to maximise self payout through self vote timing, the curation system will be sub optimal or will fail totally.
The danger with increasing curation payout levels is perhaps that once through a profit threshold, voters will simply move to voting up posts that they know will receive big votes - in an attempt to gain curation rewards, rather than using their old approach of selling votes or self voting. In other words, the problem just changes form, without much of any significance having been improved overall.
The complexities of Steem and the number of fine points involved (that are not covered in the Steemit blog) mean that I am not 100% sure how this proposed Hard fork change will play out in the real world - however, in thinking about this I am reminded that there IS a continual interplay of forces from 'vested interests' in Steem, whereby those who simply seek to generate 'return on investment' are pitted against 'those who want to create great content and be rewarded'. This is actually the opposite of the intention of Steem as I understand it - but it is an accurate reflection of the way that creative people often feel exploited when they attempt to capitalise on their creativity in a world that is financially dominated by those who do not respect creativity much, but who try to control and use it in others anyway.
We cannot have it both ways - we cannot devalue creativity and fail to reward it, while also attempting to profit from its presence. My suggestion is that those who hold the most Steem Power spend significant amounts of their free time in creative pursuits so that they learn to more deeply value and respect the creativity in others - plus more deeply respect themselves. I am not saying that those with the most SP are by definition un-creative or lack integrity, not at all, but I AM saying that there is a balance that is missing here which doesn't feel good to those who place creativity as having greater worth than the somewhat abstract holding of tokens.
Ironically, it is often the case that those with the most money try to look down on creative people (who may have little money currently) - yet without creativity, the money itself has no value and there is nothing to use it for. If we are going to subjectively value the contribution of people to life, I suggest considering creativity as being among the highest and most valuable of contributions, with financial wealth being nothing special at all... This, though, is a principle that is not very well reflected in Steem currently.. So what can be done to improve the situation?
My initial idea for a 'generosity' rank at Steem Ocean did a decent job of giving a rough overview of who curates content in a productive way - but now I think I want to take it further. I am considering, as time permits, developing a way of measuring how closely aligned the actions of curators are to the 'will of the people' - perhaps by comparing their curation payouts to the number of total votes awarded to the posts involved... In other words, some kind of measurement to determine who is being rewarded curation for posts that many people actually like, plus who is being rewarded curation for posts than only they or a small number like... What do you think? Might this work?
Additionally, I am thinking about ways of motivating curators to vote for content that truly benefits the community and life in general, beyond just economically through rewards. Perhaps some kind of handpicked list of posts can be made by those who are genuinely interested in finding life changing, heart moving posts and then the users who have upvoted those posts can be identified and promoted as being valued curators - drawing more attention to them and potentially then gaining them more followers and upvotes.
This is a complex situation and it is fun to find what works best for us all - it remains to be seen whether HF20 will make much difference for the better - or whether it will actually result in just having higher payouts for the top dogs and less for everyone else (which sadly seems to be the result of nearly every policy change on Earth!).
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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