Collaborate to Succeed: Steem blogging teams (teems?😉) - take 2

TL;DR: Problem: Blog owners need to post frequently to establish a reputation and build an audience, but this is hard; Solution: A Steem blogging team can deliver frequency and quality, benefiting all team members.

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Problem 1: Blog owners need to post frequently in order to establish a reputation and build an audience.
Problem 2: Posting frequently with fresh content that people want to read is hard for most authors.

Result: Many (most?) one-person blogs either have sporadic content that's worth the time for an audience to read - but sporadic content loses audiences; or else they have frequent content that's not worth its page-load time to a potential reader.

These aren't just problems on Steem. It seems to me that they're problems everywhere that people blog. It's not hard to go to any other blogging site like Blogger, Medium, or Substack, and find blogs that started out with promise and quickly went dark.

However, Steem offers a unique solution to this problem. Last year, for example, I posted the article, Who wants to start a blogging team?. Think of a blogging team like a bitcoin mining pool. In Steem's case, we imagine the use of a shared a account that generates frequent content, eases the audience-building process, and distributes posting rewards using beneficiary settings.

Individual teams could establish their own standards about things like topics, writing style, frequency of posting, and requirements for voting on the team's posts.

For example, as the founder of the Popular STEM community, maybe I would want to create a shared Steem account and build a blogging team around science, technology, engineering, and mathematics topics. Or maybe a sports community would want to build a blogging team with people who write about sports. By focusing more frequent articles in a single account, it should be much easier for that account to establish a following.

A year later, I still think this could be a partial solution to many of Steem's challenges, but I also recognize that the previous implementation was complicated. What if we could simplify the idea?

Here's what I have in mind now.

• First, someone creates a shared account for the team to use for blogging. The account owner then shares the posting keys with 1 or more other team members. This person will have some extra influence because they can always change the keys, but they will never control the blogging rewards. Here's why.
• It will be agreed that all author rewards will be distributed to team members through the use of private accounts and beneficiary rewards.
• Specifically (and here's the new simplification), each post has a 50/50 split of beneficiary rewards. 50% goes to the current author, and 50% goes to the author of the previous post from the team account.

So, some questions arise:

1. Why would an author surrender 50% of their rewards to another team member? Of course, the answer is that the author benefits from the steady stream of content that the entire team produces. Also, they can expect to receive rewards from the next post by another team member.
2. What about rewards for other team members who didn't post last? Bottom line: if everyone is posting regularly, then everyone has chances at rewards, and the more frequently you post, the more you earn. However, the team (and especially the shared account owner) are expected to enforce standards by controlling posting access.
3. What about team members who refuse to share rewards? Again, this is controlled by posting access. A "cheater" can only get away with it once if the rest of the team is paying attention.
4. What if two team members post at the same time and double-up rewards to a previous author? I'm not aware of a technical solution to this problem, so team members will need to communicate and coordinate with each other. Not ideal, but this is what teams do.
5. Is this a Sybil attack? The steemcurator03-steemcurator09 accounts already do this for curation teams. This is merely applying the same terms to authors. Steem's stake-weighted voting rewards were designed to accommodate multiple accounts per person (in fact, when PoW mining existed, multiple accounts were basically required). As a matter of ethics, team accounts should be transparent about the account sharing and the individual authors should get credit for their own writing, but it's not abusing the rewards system.

Bonus points 1: If a team has seven members posting daily and delivering legitimate organic content, would that be a more productive use of Steem's paid voting services?

Bonus points 2: Having a team of two or three or five or more authors means that more people could share the blog's content on other platforms (like X or Facebook) for visibility and reach.

Bonus points 3: What would it look like to build a Steem blockchain community around one of these team blogging accounts, instead of (or in addition to) building around a curation account?

Thoughts?

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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