Curation and Economic update

While we are still working on update 0.8 and fixing our issues with storage and buffering, we decided to release this short part of 0.8 update a bit earlier because we felt like it deserves it's own article and visibility.

DTube Sponsorship Program

Starting from today, we are welcoming anyone to delegate Steem Power to DTube. While we would prefer that our users manually curate our content, we want to provide this option of passively investing while supporting DTube.

We will return your share of the curation rewards, and your share of the beneficiary rewards generated by the @dtube votes. Financially speaking, it will exactly the same as actively curating DTube content yourself with your own account. More about that a bit later in the article.

The delegation redistribution will happen weekly and will begin on the 18th of May 2018. You need to delegate before the 11th of May 2018 to be eligible for the first weekly payment.

On top of it, in order to increase DTube's voting diversity, we will invite our top three delegators into our curation team, if they refuse, we will propose to the next highest delegators. We will contact top delegators through our Discord server on the 11th of May 2018.

Improving our Curation

Opening our curation to new people requires us to improve our tools and organization.

We now run a discord bot that helps our curators work together and avoid mistakes we did in the past, such as re-voting on the same content, misclicking the voting percentage, voting for impostors, voting for old reposted videos, etc.

The decision to vote or downvote a content remains entirely human. The bot only provides arbitrage between curators to reach a common decision.

The bot has many features:

• Detects reposts and plagiarism and blocks votes for those
• Creates a 15 minutes decision window where all curators can contest an upvote
• The more curators agree that a video is good, the stronger the vote will be
• Lowers the vote strength depending on how many votes the author already received this week
• Waits to never vote earlier than 30 minutes
• Creates logs from the curation discord channel

We have tested this new system for a couple days now, and it seems pretty solid as nobody saw or talked about the change. This will allow us to improve our current ~5 people curation team to probably 10+ in the future, and miss less good videos.

Redistributing DTube Beneficiary Rewards

One of the most prominent concern of our users has been our '25% fees'. Technically speaking, at the current market value of SBD, our fees were about:
25 / (50+50*3.83) ~= 11%

These fees covered our costs for storage servers, encoding servers, paid a moderate income to our staff, paid for the AskSteem API, and we still have 80000 STEEM on our account to pay for bigger things in the future. Luckily, we will still earn curation rewards and will be able to keep afloat financially without having to compromise our future tokens fair distribution.

Instead of simply stopping to collect these beneficiary rewards like most other apps, we have decided to fully redistribute it to curators instead. This happens through the @dtube.rewards account that was created and started operating recently.

The way it works is simple, it looks at the beneficiary rewards collected by @dtube for a video, then distributes it back amongst all the voters, proportionally to the strength of their votes (rshares). The only exception to this rule, is when the voter is a public vote-selling bot, in which case the associated reward with the vote will be sent to the author instead of the bot.

We thought a lot about these changes, and we strongly believe that curators should be rewarded more than what they are currently rewarded. We are therefore using our beneficiary rewards to create this unique experiment on a large scale. This will give us precious insights for the future of DTube, where we want to create a balanced and self-sustaining economy.