Dustsweeping Your Comments. Dust and the Reward Curve.

Do you know comments (and posts) with a lower payout than roughly 0.02 STU are ignored at payout time? That's why they are called dust, they are not high enough to make it through.

Most comments have this issue, especially after STEEM price went well below $1. If a big account votes your comment with 1%, you will get nothing if you comment payout is below the dust threshold at payout time. When I vote with 50%, that is also below the dust level. I need to vote a comment with 65%, sometimes more to get it over the dust threshold.

Have you heard of @dustsweeper?

That is (was? - see below, next section) an interesting project, which will upvote your comments that have been upvoted but don't make it over the dust threshold.

How does it work?

Well, you send an amount of STEEM or SBD to @dustsweeper and it will add to your balance twice that amount. Why twice the amount? Because it will also earn curation rewards, which are used to grow the dustsweeper account further, along with delegations.

You will receive upvotes as long as you have funds in your balance.

The process was explained here:
https://steemit.com/community/@dustsweeper/ann-introducing-dustsweeper-a-new-service-to-turn-dust-into-profit

Ok, that sounds great! Because without dustsweeper (or self-upvoting your own comments if you have high enough SP, but such actions aren't very well received), you will lose the author and curation rewards of the comments and posts below the dust threshold.

Dust and the Reward Curve

Well, dust won't be the main issue with EIP, although more posts will be below the dust level.

Because it is likely that one of the main effects of the convergent linear curve will be a drop of engagement. Or at least upvoting comments, since most of them will be on the super linear side of the curve and those upvoting will be losing. A good counter balance proposal to this is reducing the curation window from 15 minutes to 1 minute, since many quickly respond/upvote via apps like Partiko as soon as notified of the comment. Reducing the curation window to 1 minute won't deprive them of most of their curation reward, like today.

And a service like dustsweeper that aims to bring your posts/comments payouts above dust level will lose its purpose, firstly because there won't be enough comments upvoted below dust level worth sweeping, and secondly because at the dust level it operates on a super linear curve, and it uses the SP inefficiently.

I heard stated that one reason for the EIP was to fight bidbots.

I believe this will actually empower them, in multiple ways. One of them I'd like to mention in this context is the need of more people to boost their posts' payouts above 16 STEEM, to make the rewards converge to linear.