I know this topic has already been discussed at length in the past couple weeks but I want to revive the debate as I firmly believe that eliminating curation rewards is essential for steem to move forward.
Let's see how these curation rewards negatively impact the platform.
Curation rewards create a lot of complexity and confusion for new users
These are the kind of questions newbies ask themselves: Why do all the votes on my post come up at the 30 min mark ? How can my post have 4 views and 70 votes? Why do most comments have no rewards?
Curation rewards only benefit a small numbers of users
The vast majority of curation rewards are earned by a tiny minority. These rewards are also based on a specific algorithm. The algorithm defines the rules of the game. Most users have no idea how the rules work and the average joe won't care enough to learn them.
Curation reward discourage whales to spread their upvotes
Because of the reward curve whales are encouraged to vote at 100% weight to earn the max curation rewards, so posts either gets a few pennies or tens of dollars.
Curation rewards creates centralization pressure
Guilds were meant to spread the rewards around but because of curation rewards they ended up doing the opposite. Guilds owner are encouraged to not spread their vote because if they do they will lose out on curation rewards.
Curation rewards have turned the site into a fake system run by bots and driven by money
No businesses is going to touch steem in its current form.
Curation rewards have forced users to change their voting behaviors
Recently I noticed something very telling is that everyone was voting at 1% on my posts. So I looked into it further and concluded that these were not bots, they were real individuals voting because vote were all made at seperate times.
I'll be the first to admit that I often vote at 1% especially on comments. These are the signs of a broken system.
The argument for keeping curation rewards is that investors won't have any incentives to buy steem power if we remove them.
This assumption is incorrect, it is based on the idea that investors care about growing the number of their steem more than growing the value of steem. There is a very vocal minority in this community who are very self centered and believe that growing the number of steem in their wallet is the end goal. It was the same group of people that were bragging about HF16 because they wouldn't receive their inflation anymore. These individuals don't seem to understand that 1 000 000 steem is worth as much as 1 steem when the price is zero.
Another argument for keeping them is that steemit's model is based on rewarding people who contribute to the platform and curating is a form of contribution. I don't disagree with this however curating doesn't solve a real world problem, good content naturally rises to the top. To me the major innovation of steem is that it creates a new model that rewards content creator without directly relying on advertisement.
There are also a few individuals that have been very vocal against removing these rewards, these people so happens to be among the small minority that benefits a lot from curation rewards. There is definetely a conflict of interest going on there.
If we want steem to reach its full potentialwe will have to get past this and think how something can benefit the platform as a whole, not just a few persons.
Here is a quote from @denmarkguy which describes perfectly the current situation
Steemit is reaching that tricky stage where early adopters become resistant to change in service of "protecting their existing benefits" while also being aware that continued growth depends on making changes in such ways that the community becomes attractive to newcomers.
The value of the platform will be a lot higher in the eyes of investors if curation rewards are removed, no more bots, quality content, fairer distribution, less greed mentality, more appealing for other website to integrate, more comment voting, less confusing for newbies, more engagement,etc..all of these will make the platform a lot more valuable than it is now.
Eliminating curation reward will also improve one major issue which is power concentration. Without curation rewards whales will be upvoting a lot less and will spread their vote a lot more which is essential for retention.They will also be a lot more likely to delegate their voting power because doing so will be a win win, they won't lose out on curation anymore and will finally be able to focus on growing the value of steem.
It will also increase engagement a lot because active users will have a lot more stake to vote with since bots won't be voting anymore.
Votes will be a lot more meaningfull and users's reputation will be on the line when they vote for something.
The comment pool will be totally unnecessary, if curation rewards are eliminated comments will be rewarded a LOT more.
I have been very vocal about this comment pool because i think it is a terrible idea, it is not KISS at all and do not solve the underlying issue.
I thought it was pretty bad without curation rewards but now they want to make it with curation rewards, this is even worse basically it will replicate the exact same broken system in the comment section, you will see comments worth $30 and other comments worth a few pennies, you will see whales downvote a lot and people whining even more, all this pool is going to achieve is increase infighting and unfair sentiment within the community.
Eliminating curation rewards is a much cleaner and elegant way to deal with this problem.
Here is an interesting read from @timcliff about eliminating curation rewards
https://steemit.com/curation/@timcliff/elimination-of-curation-rewards
You can go check it out, I am going to address here only the arguments for keeping them
Curation rewards are currently one of the only reasons to power up / remain powered up.
From the perspective of growing your steem it is a good reason, however the goal should be to grow the value of steem. If the platform becomes more valuable, more businesses will be interested and investors will come. With curation you are targeting a very small group of investors. The majority of investors are not interested about setting up bots or curating a few hours a day, they want passive income.
There are a huge amount of users that are actively involved in the platform through curation activities (developing bots, curation trails, guilds, manual curation, etc.).
Users involved in these activities are wasting their time because they are not adding real value to the platform. Bots are actually undermining the credibility of the whole site and guilds are increasing centralization. Imagine if all these users were working on productive things to increase the value of steem.
Curation rewards provides a financial incentive for users to spend a very significant amount of their time discovering good content.
This is completely unnecessary, users will upvote good content regardless of the incentives. Also due to curation rewards 'good content' as turned into 'content with high payouts' so you end up having people voting for garbage content just so they can pocket a lot of curation rewards.
The goal of the platform is to reward users for their contributions for the platform, and curating is a form of contributing.Lots of users find earning curation rewards fun.
The majority of users earn very very little from curation rewards. There are only a tiny minority who makes decent amount from curation. I don't think many users find it fun because almost everyone is subscribed to bots. And many don't have a clue about the voting algorithm.
I am convinced that eliminating curation rewards will be a big positive for steem, I am myself earning a lot of these rewards every week but i can see the bigger picture and want to grow the value of steem. I know there is a lot of support in the community for eliminating them, Dan the creator of steem himself is in favor so let's do this guys!!
Oh, for goodness sakes, not again. Where to begin? Obviously, I can't respond to your whole article in one comment, but a few points.
-1-
When the whitepaper was written, people could be rewarded for witnessing, market making, mining, curating, or authoring. After hf17, only witnessing, curating, and authoring will be left. When you take away curating, how far behind do you think the author rewards will be? Your arguments all apply to authors, too. People write for free on other web sites, and the rewards distribution changes the things that they post and write about. Why shouldn't authors be satisfied with the same long-term increasing value of their steem power that you expect the voters to be happy with?
-2-
Writing a bot and keeping it running is not "passive investing." It's taking an active interest in the content on the blockchain. To get a reward, the bot needs to predict what people will vote on. And yes, someone who invests the time and resources it takes to do that well should be rewarded. The better the voting, the bigger the reward.
-3-
Look at the "Blockchain Operations Distribution" chart at the bottom of this page - https://steemdata.com/charts
And your conclusion is that the author rewards should stay and the curation rewards should be eliminated? That slice of curation rewards is an awful lot of unhappy customers to alienate all at the same time. Who, exactly, do you think is going to read the articles if just the writers are still here using the site?
-4-
Finally, the 1% voters are not manual voters. They're bots in pursuit of something very similar to your own goal. Here are the announcements. And Dan's comment is very disappointing (frightening, actually...)
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Guild owners voting with their clients's accounts to skew public opinion is a pretty desperate and dishonest behavior.
This is one of those thing that you get with curation rewards..
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Agreed. I would downvote it to zero if I saw it earlier.
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Agree it's frightening. I think curation rewards are the most innovative thing here. Everything else has been done somewhere else. Lots of places don't pay you to vote. Lots of places pay you on views. Curation is only originality of steem (sbd are also original but not being used well)
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Steem is a new protocol for rewarding content online. It is a technology that turns the advertising model on its head and give the power back to the people. It hasn't been done anywhere else.
Its similar to a DAO ( decentralized autonomous organization ) where users are the stakholders and the influence is based on their stake in this 'organization'.
If you think curation is the only originality you are missing the point of this technology.
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Agree! 😆
But disagree that it's always the case that
Not all bots directly attempt to predict what people will vote on.
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True. I oversimplified that a bit.
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This topic has been debated a lot, but I do feel that many of the problems you point out (correctly) can be fixed by a better system. The pro-curation rewards side will say it's what will attract most people to join, by lowering the barrier of entry to participation, and many support increasing rewards to 50-50. The anti curation rewards side would say it's a waste of resources that feeds bots and the greedy. The truth is in the middle. Curation is a valuable service require a lot of time and effort if performed consistently and correctly. Those who do so deserve a reward for their services. The current system is broken, but the idea is not fundamentally flawed. Things will get a lot better with the new rewards curve in HF17, so we are making progress.
These are obviously false even today. Curators stands to earn far more from voting on new authors who don't get much votes. Or whichever post has the least vote competition from bots etc. In fact, some have started spreading their votes through comments as they are mostly all unvoted.
This is why curators that vote for semi-established authors (Steem Guild) made a tiny fraction in curation rewards compared to curators that spread their votes on new authors (Curie or blocktrades) or curators voting on comments (abit).
As a matter of fact, the opposite problem is true - curators are too heavily incentivized to spread their voting rather than continue to support good authors. Of course, this is another problem that can be fixed with a simpler system.
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How is curation a valuable service? Valuable to whom?
To me the concept of curating is flawed because it forces people to vote for stuff they are not interested in. It goes against the natural will of people. As more and more content gets published on the steem blockchain the less sense it will make to curate, why would you upvote family pics from people you never heard of? People are going to form their own little communities and upvote within that community, curating content on the whole blockchain makes no sense.
There is a nuance between spread and diversify. What you refer to is diversification. I am talking about the weight guilds put on posts, they never vote under 100%. They put all the weight on the posts that they vote to pocket max curation rewards.
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Curation is valuable to the whole platform.
//Edit: to be clear, I'm not talking about the "curation" happening now on Steem, but the natural curation behavior.
Image a new user come to this website to look for popular contents. She'll see the trending page. The posts are there because the curators (voters) have done their work.
Image a Q/A post which have thousands of replies. It's the curators that brought the most valuable replies to the top, so saves later readers' time.
It's not the concept of curating that is flawed, it's the curation reward distribution mechanism that is flawed. A bad-designed incentive mechanism brings bad results. IMHO it's better to make the incentives aligned, but not eliminate them. I strongly suggest you to read my post and the discussions there: https://steemit.com/curation/@abit/benefits-of-pure-linear-reward-distribution .
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Good content naturally rises to the top, there is no need to incentivizes people to vote.
Also currently it is not 'good content' that rises to the top , it is 'content that will earn the most money'. The platform don't really reflects what most people want.
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The kind of curation that is currently happening is not valuable actually.
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It is demonstrably valuable. The Trending page today is pretty diverse and shows the best of Steemit, once you get past the first 10-15 posts. There's a really long tail of good content. This is different from July/Aug when the Trending page was dominated by 20-30 authors - you will remember as you were one of them - and the thousands others (at the time) fighting for scraps, and most ending up with 0 cents or comments.
Today, with an organized curation community, it's nigh impossible for a new author creating good content to go unnoticed.
That said, I'll agree that much of the content on Steemit is mediocre, but that's to be expected of such a tiny community. Even the "Best of Steemit" isn't really good enough. When the quality of material on Steemit improves, the curation community will be there to make sure the new authors with the best content are given exposure and rewarded. Another problem with a tiny community is also that there are very few readers. Again, that can be solved by marketing and outreach programs.
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I don't disagree. I was talking about natural behavior.
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YES:
YOU ARE CORRECT. This place is fake and eveybody knows it. This lack of real substance degrades our reptuation and makes people mock us. Hell, I can't even stand on firm ground when I tell people I write on this platform. We need readers, real people, and those who actually give a shit about reading to come in here and add value.
We don't need to line the whale pockets of those who don't even like to read.
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Good point. Perhaps we get rid of author rewards as well. People also don't get paid for posting elsewhere.
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That's as clear a non-sequitur as ever I saw one, just a debating trick, "sounds alike, must be connected". Rewarding authors can well exist without financially rewarding curators if you want it to be so, the one doesn't necessarily lead to the other; there may be an implicit economic model linking the two in some people's minds, but that doesn't make it true or even an interesting point.
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It's a valuable service to the community, as many have stated before. Again, that's a function of the current system rather than the concept of curation rewards itself. You are right that in July 2016 the curation landscape was really messed up, and only 20-30 authors were being upvoted regularly. The bots were all swarming to these authors, while the rest of the community went unrewarded.
However, things have changed dramatically since. With the emergence of curation guilds that focused sincerely on quality and seeking out new authors, bots have had to adapt and use clever algorithms to determine quality and vote on posts by new authors. Indeed, this has also encouraged manual curators to vote on good posts they like, because they know a curation guild or whale would be looking out for these posts.
Today, the curation community is so efficient that it is almost impossible for a new author creating good content to go unnoticed for long. This is because the curation rewards allow incentive for intensive curation. Several curators spend several hours every single day trying to find the best quality posts and they'll stop doing so and switch to casual mode without an incentive. Casual mode is where votes keep on piling on the same authors over and over again, with no one bothering to dig to the depths to find great content that was lost.
Without these curators, Steemit would be the wasteland it was in July/Aug 2016. Thousands of users left ignored with zero exposure. Today, while influx of users hasn't happened, many of them have been at least discovered and given a shot at being retained.
I will agree though that with the Communities feature incoming, curation rewards may not be required for voting and could be restructured to actual curation, Communities moderators etc.
This is also demonstrably false. Steem Trail does vote with most posts at 100%, but Curie's average strength has always been about 40%-70%, while Steem Guild was about 25% for many months. Steem Guild has since changed their focus, but your claim of "they never vote under 100%" isn't true at all. That said, the top independent curators blocktrades and abit do vote 100%.
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I agree with a lot of things you said , you made a good analysis of the situation.
However to me this is the wrong strategy for mainstream adoption, because it only attracts money opportunists who have no interest in developing their friends/family circle on steemit. They come here with only one purpose which is to make money. This is why steemit is not growing because people see steemit as a site to make money, a bit like gambling, they don't see it as a social media site.
You said
This is good actually. If a new users doesn't get any reward it is a good sign, however when a newbie receives 20 votes at the same time from random stranger the system looks fake af
In any social media site new users have to build their audience, they have to build their communities, their friend,family circle in order to get upvotes. Here on steemit they don't need any of this, it is just a lottery, you post something, sometimes you win sometimes you don't but there is no incentives to build your community.
If curation rewards are eliminated it would allow for natural growth, active users would have more power and people who post here will have to engage more to get upvotes, they will have to bring their family/friends over in order to get upvotes from them, and since users will have more influence it will encourage everyone to buy steem.
If steemit want real growth influence will have to be made available to active users so that these users can build their little communities and grow from there. This is the only way you are going to scale to millions of users and make steemit attractive to the average person.
This site assumes that people want to share stuff with strangers,etc..some people don't want to be part of the whole thing they just want to be with their friends and upvote each other's content. To me this is the only logical way to scale, because it is a natural way, whether their is money or not involved that's how people use social media site.
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I feel everything you are looking for is actually achieved by the incentive of curation rewards. I agree with most of it, and I'm confident that curation rewards go some way in achieving our common goal.
The big elephant in the room is the complete lack of concerted marketing and outreach programs to actually bring in new users. Indeed, curation rewards are a novel idea that may encourage millions of users to sign up.
Let's see how the system functions at a representative scale - millions of users. Again, like I said, with the Communities feature coming in the end of the year, we can think of eliminating voting rewards for more direct curation/moderation rewards.
Till then, we'll have to agree to disagree about the impact of curation rewards. :)
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Curation rewards encourages people to vote for post outside of their circle/communities, they achieves the opposite of what I am looking for.
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Most of the voting is done by people without an incentive because they get near to zero rewards for it anyway. Many people pick up good authors and resteem them to give them exposure, without a financial benefit.
I think people vote because they like the content, and they will continue doing so without financial incentives. Perhaps the ones that vote for incentives/rewards can be missed.
There are very few independent voters with big wallets, I wonder what somebody like @blocktrades would do if there were no curation rewards. Maybe he and his better half would merrily curate along, in the interest of the platform and the price of Steemit.
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[Nesting]
But why not reward the people who have done their work well (assume it has really been done well)? With a "right" reward people will feel even better, so more engagement.
To be clear, I'm not saying trending in current system is natural. But current design is not good doesn't mean changing it to anything else is good.
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It seems some people's thinking is stuck in an economic model despite its not working, and that could well stifle any discussion aimed at improving things, leading to ineffective, polarised debate only.
When a model doesn't predict what actually happens, or enable what you want, you change it. You can go to a linear curve, you can abolish curation rewards, etc. Both are better options than continuing with what we are doing. I'm in favour of a linear curve now, but if it turns out it doesn't help, I'll start opposing the idea in stead of blaming reality for not cooperating.
I would then be even more in favour of abolishing curation rewards, mainly because I have other ideas about what makes people invest, what motivates people to curate, and what damage bots and reward hunters are doing.
I will freely admit I am stuck in another economic theory for now, one that takes a more anthropological approach and includes non-financial motivation, group dynamics, and fun. I may well be proven wrong also.
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Because there is no standard to tell what 'well' is , 'well' is subjective, some people might think well is this and other may think well is another thing, there is no way to define 'well'.
I don't want to change it, i want to eliminate it :)
Maybe in the future we could find a much better curation rewards system but meanwhile it is doing a lot damage and is undermining the credibility of steem.
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This is why we have voting. We're trying to define "well" by "quantity of people/SP upvoted minus downvoted". If you disagree with this definition, then we have no base to discuss.
It's still a change.
By the way I just found that you replied to my post earlier, so it's my fault to link it here for several times, sorry.
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This is the problem 'well' in the platform is currently defined by being 'content that pay the most.' not ' content that people like the most'
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[Nesting]
Sounds like you want to get rid of stake based voting. That's interesting. Ask Dan?
IMHO without stake based voting Steem is no difference than reddit or other sites.
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I don't want to get rid of stake based voting. It's the whole point of buying steem, to have more influence than others.
I want a system that do not use money to change people's voting behavior , I want a natural system where people upvote for stuff they like.
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[Nesting]
Yes, with stake based voting, naturally you'll have some person has more influence than others. Then naturally you'll have 'content that pay the most' as the 'content that people like the most'. You can't have your cake and eat it. What do you really want indeed?
Use money to encourage people to vote for better content is not evil. BTW "better" is defined above.
I'll say it again: this can be done with a linear rewarding mechanism.
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It is extremely valuable to users and to the platform itself. Any site with a large amount of content would be a complete jumble of unusable nonsense if there weren't some form of curation. Most successful (centralized) sites explicitly use a combination of human and algorithmic curation, or algorithmic with some degree of user input. They spend a lot of money developing maintaining and operating these systems. BTW, another word for algorithmic curation in the context of a decentralized system is bot voting.
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Reddit has a large amount of content and it's clean. The upvotes/downvote system works well.
A site would be messy only if more people where upvoting trash than good content, also like I said many times in this thread 'complete jumble of unusable nonsense' is subjective if it s stuff that people have upvoted then its content that they want to see and if they havn;t upvoted it then it will be ignored and left in a little corner.
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Yes reddit does, and curation is extremely valuable on reddit too (which was the question you asked). It isn't incentivized on reddit but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be. Again, many other people have pointed out to you that reddit doesn't pay for posts either, and has plenty of those. The argument is sound that just because other sites don't pay for X and get X does not mean that X shouldn't be paid for.
And BTW, reddit doesn't rank solely based on votes either. Votes are fed into a secret algorithm that produces a score which is displayed and used for ranking. As I mentioned elsewhere, the analogous concept of an algorithm used for ranking on a centralized system is vote bots that provide algorithmic input to ranking a decentralized system.
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The reason it is valuable it is because it isn't incentivized. People are voting with their hearts not their greedy minds. If you were to create a curation rewards system on reddit you would have the exact same problem that steemit has and the site would turn into shit.
I don't know why people keep repeating this, how is this relevant to the discussion of eliminating curation rewards? My argument for removing curation rewards has never been that people will still vote even without rewards. This was just a response to someone who said nobody would vote if curation rewards are eliminated. All the reasons for removing these rewards are in OP.
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[nesting]
I would argue the same about posting. A lot of posting on Steemit is just doing what "greedy minds" think will earn rewards (often correctly), and not what they enjoy posting.
Because ultimately a lot of the same reasons apply. Most people participate in social media for enjoyment and social interaction. Even a lot of blogging is basically done for enjoyment outside of a few professionals who already monetize one way or another. The idea that non-professional social interaction in the form of posting is going to be paid introduces many of the exact same distortions that you claim occur with voting (i.e. decisions made by greedy minds rather than hearts), with the main difference being that even if you are the #1 best poster on the site (unlikely being the best curator) you have no incentive to buy or hold STEEM/SP because it doesn't help your earnings.
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With greedy mind but writing a rewardable post is much more harder and requires significantly more costs than click upvote button or enter your posting key and rules into voting trails.
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I want to tell here the newbie point of view: If humans and/or bots vote without even looking at the content then what does this upvote say about the content ? What does it do? a) unsharpen the cristallization of real good valuable content because nobody looked at it and it was more a question of united voteshifting,trail&whale strategies and not about the quality of the content. b) If i don´t look into the story how can i tell if it is worth gaining reputation ?? I know cruelsome newbie questions but how does a bot/algorhythm define if it is worth gaining repution or being upvoted ??? I thought in the beginning curators are persons watching the content and checkmarking it as usefull. So i did a lot of reseach last 72 h but still I dont understand some
mechanism like STEEMvoter. If i sign up there steemvoter votes for me and as it says in the rules 1 Vote every day steemvoter will use itself to promote$$ itself. this end up in massive downpowering and wealth export as i saw in the steemvoter history. I do not understand the genius advantage behind this but I´m open to learn more. I expressed my fears in the following grafics. Thank you for the attention
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NO, in terms of financial amount, the curation reward is far from enough to incentivise any users, including whales, to spend their time on the job.
When we talk financial, it's not the absolute amount that we should be looking, but the return-on-investment (ROI).
Just have a look at how much a Top curator can earns: http://steemwhales.com/trending/?p=1&d=1&s=cr
The average rewards received by the top-10 curators (my bot is among them) are somewhere 0.05~0.1% per-day, which translated into and ROI of 20~40% p.a.
While this figure might sound attractive to some guys, it's not attractive at all if you take into consideration the risk associating (There's high possibility that your SP will become valueless if Steemit couldn't turn out success).
And bear in mind that these return-rates can only be achieved with bots which mainly bring negative value to the platform. Most curators (including whales who running bots) are having an ROI lower than 15% p.a.
Those who honestly do manual curation will hardly get any better than 3%p.a.... and for the coming HF17 with more linear curve, we should see the rewards spread more evenly, which will result in overall lower ROI even for top curation-bots.
Any incentive that couldn't beat the minimum interest-rate or inflation in our real-world, is considered negative incentive.
IMO, the curation reward is never going to be a main reason that's drive people to do the curation.
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I agree with you, generally. But I disagree with the claim that human curators can't earn as much ROI as bots. I was right on the heels of @biophil's bot for a few weeks until I had to back off a liitle of the time I was putting into the platform. I was right there earning ~25%+ per year. On a regular curation day, I can still earn over 0.05%, even without using my 40 daily votes.
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Here's what I haven't figured out yet:
If you and other users are so adamantly against voting incentives/rewards, then why aren't you declining payout on your posts? Surely, you don't want to be contributing to the greed of voters who will earn ~12% of the total rewards allocated to your posts, right?
And if the argument continues to be that voting is done on other platforms without voting rewards, then let's also get rid of posting rewards - since posting on the most popular social media sites occurs millions and millions of times per day without rewards for doing so. Let's remain consistent here, shall we?
And if we're going to remain consistent and be opposed to rewards, why are we here? Why don't we have @dan rewrite the code and make this a free platform like all the others? I suppose Steemit would then just have to attract a larger user base with only its fantastic UI functions and design.
Has the "revolution" already ended? Did I miss it?
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To be honest I don't care about the money from post, I never think about this when I post, i think of the comment response. If you look at my history you will see that I hardly ever post compared to people who posts everyday.
Also you fail to understand that I am not against curators personally, I didn't create this posts because I wanted to eliminate their gains. I created this post to improve the system and increase the value of steem.
This is not the argument actually. This is a response to a stupid argument which is that people will stop voting if curation rewards are eliminated.
Posting rewards do not harm the system in any way, they actually bring value to the site unlike curation rewards.
Your argument would be valid only if posts had the same bad incentives that curation rewards have which is not the case.
There is only a tiny amount of people who actually make any significant money from curation.
Curations rewards are not the same has authors rewards, please don't take things out of context.
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Yes, and your plan to "increase the value of steem" is by eliminating the incentives for curators - to "eliminate their gains."
No, that was a response to the notion that "rewards aren't necessary because people will vote anyway." You have argued this point repeatedly - that users don't need monetary incentives to vote for content. The exact same is true for people who post online and do it without monetary incentives. There is no difference at all in the two arguments. Since this system is based on incentives for both content creators and content consumers, because they both perform necessary tasks of creation and evaluation, the reward incentives are for both types of users. If you eliminate one or heavily favor one over the other, then the incentive structure becomes imbalanced and the results become skewed, as we have observed.
What is your proof that the existence of curation rewards "harms" the system? And why do you believe that posting rewards do not? And are you not aware of the spam, plagiarism, and sybil attempts to game the system? I don't see how you can simply say that one incentive is bad and the other is good when both can be gamed, both are gamed, and both were designed to achieve specific results for the platform. But for all of the gaming that occurs (and was known would occur), the incentive structure has been proven to work for both creation and curation.
My argument is valid because people do post and do vote on other sites without monetary incentives. This is a fact. Let's not pretend that voting is done on other sites for free, therefore, we don't need to incentivize it. And let's not pretend that only voters are driven by the desire to earn. This isn't why curation is incentivized on Steemit. It's incentivized because this platform was created explicitly for the purposes of rewarding social media users for their social media activities.
This is irrelevant. The average user isn't supposed to be making "significant money" from upvoting posts in the first place. And I would argue that the average user isn't supposed to be making "significant money" from posting either. But users do have the opportunity to earn some money from being active on the platform. This isn't a job and this isn't supposed to be a UBI. It's simply an onboarding mechanism for a cryptocurrency. That's one of very few things that this site actually does well, in my opinion.
Nothing was taken "out of context." I was simply applying the arguments to posting rewards.
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Which in turn will increase the value of their steem. Also there is only a tiny minority earning decent rewards from curation.
80-90% of voting is done by bots, curation rewards do not incentivize voting, they incentivize people running bots to earn money.
The structure is unbalanced today because of this, comments gets a few views and hundreds of votes, you can't get any more unbalanced than that.
Read OP please
Posting rewards and curation rewards are not comparable. There is no algorithm for posting. They are two very different things with different incentives.
Thanks for validating my point.
90% of curators are bots, and so inactive on the platform.
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I want to add more. If one posts garbage, it can be downvoted and ones reputation will be harmed. There is both positive/negative feedback system on posting reward. However, there is no feedback on one's voting itself, and there is no costs from voting.
Equating no curation reward with no posting reward does not make sense IMO, and I agree that badly designed (mis-aligned) incentives is the target here.
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Actually authors have nothing to lose, because authors don't need to buy STEEM to be able to post. Write good contents then earn more, or write garbage then earn less even nothing, but it is still no financial cost.
On the other hand, for voters, they have financial opportunity cost as a whole, voting badly (or others voting badly) then STEEM price go down, but voting better doesn't mean price go up, just my speculations though.
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Both authors and voters don't have to buy STEEM if they signed up via Steemit. There are many free accounts using Steemvoter service (while they barely get curation reward, they are doing because they can earn anyway).
Generally, writing a post consumes tens of times of time and energy more than reading, or infinite times more than bots because they don't read. While, there is an argument for tipping-based system as well and I understand it's reasons, I would say rewarding author is essential.
Bad voting doesn't directly decrease the price nor good voting increase it. But degraded platform by bad voting can drive away users and consequently harm the price.
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Except...this isn't true. If one continually makes bad votes, then they risk losing out on curation rewards because other voters may likely disagree with their choices. The result of that is not earning a curation reward and the cost is losing that voting power.
Let's not continue to make arguments based on the skewed results we see today due to disproportionate pre-mined stakes and imbalanced incentive structures. Why do some people continue to confuse cause and effect?
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That's true only if one makes very bad votes 40 times everyday. If they do not make such a mistake, there are some profit.
Many for-profit bots are from non-pre-mined accounts. Curation reward is a separate issue; not heavily related to fairness but related to wrongly designed incentive system.
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Lol, I'm crying
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lol
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This is the saddest part actually, people are fighting for crumbs and they want these crumbs so badly that they can't see the enormous value that would come from removing these crumbs.
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No, the saddest part is that the rewards are only 12% because they have been reduced from 50% to 25%, minus the reverse auction. This is the reason why you're seeing more automation for voting. It has to do with that whole incentive thing. When the rewards for spending time/energy on a specific task are reduced, you tend to get less of it or a lower quality, or both. Or you get automation, which can result in the same outcome.
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Hence Linux?
There are other rewards and motivators than money. As long as you do not include those in your economic thinking, I predict your predictions will not be very good.
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Yes, but on this platform, the incentives are the cryptocurrency. It's the entire purpose of the token. It is meant as an onboarding mechanism for social media users, hence the payments in STEEM, STEEM Power, and STEEM-backed dollars.
As long as people refuse to acknowledge the purpose, I predict that their solutions will not be very good.
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Many debating tricks and very little reasoning in what you write here, and I suspect you know that. Very un-gentlemanlike, I'm used to better from you.
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That's impossible. My profile specifically states that I am indeed a gentleman.
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My apologies. It must be true, then.
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Wow, what a post I stumbled upon here. Great points.
Obviously there are many businesses now using the curation reward system but also many new apps build on Steem like Dtube, Viewly, Steepshot, Zappl and now Mangosteem Chat. Also the price is way up to when this post was written.
Regarding all that, what are your thoughts on curation rewards now after half a year?
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As a newcomer to Steemit January 2017. I looked to the voting on posts as a measure of progress with my writing,but am now disappointed to read that the voting can be manipulated by bots and other means,so if the system is flawed and voting discontinued,then what is there to inspire challenge?
It reminds me of the Stalin quote -"It isn't the people who vote that counts,it's the people who count the votes" -
And - "The more things change the more they stay as they are"
https://steemit.com/@ijavee
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This is a good point. In a usual social media site your circle will grow organically and you have to engage a lot in order to get votes but on steemit you don't have to, you just have to be lucky. It's like a lottery. And there is no way to measure progress because you posts will either get pennies or tens of dollars, there is no organic growth its a flat line ( luck/no luck/luck/no luck)
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Thank you snowflake. That explains it perfectly.I can now tell friends and family why there can be such a discrepancy in posts that receive similar number of votes but wildly varying rewards.I'm not sure yet that I see this as a positive as you do,but I like Steemit, so onward and hopefully upwards.Cheers.Ivor.
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Something you havn't yet been given the taste of, which is called influence.
If curation rewards are eliminated you will see what it is, it's pretty cool and you will always want more of it.
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I have another proposal: Build a competitor to Steemit on a different blockchain with the incentives built the way you wan't them.
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There is a license that prevent this, without it people would have forked long ago.
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Your proposal is aiming for an entirely different product. Not a product that I would place a bet on, but no license can prevent you from building it.
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Yeah we are watching out for your new blockchain killer product @onthewayout - nice steemname btw :-). Curious to have an analysis of how many posts on steemit cover the topic and platform steemit - I guess 80%? This might not by nature attract new content creators #justsaying
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I disagree that the curation reward should be completely removed. It would certainly be a good idea to consider reducing it to something like 10% or 5%. The code is already there and an infrastructure was built around it. I can think of many inefficiencies that can be resolved by that extra incentive. (I'm not an expert and didn't think everything through, but that seems like a safer alternative)
The way the reward curve was made combined with curation reward meant that cabals would make money by colluding to upvote the same content, no matter what the content was.
The content upvoted by these guilds is, by internet standard, garbage. They are often the kind of posts that one wouldn't bother posting on their own facebook feed. Yet this "100% original content" get created for the sole purpose of being posted on steem.
Curie has a mission to encourage people who fail. People who manage to fail repetitively but show perseverance get the equivalent of a welfare handout.
How unspectacular is this from the outside world?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@donkeypong/announcing-project-curie-bringing-rewards-and-recognition-to-steemit-s-undiscovered-and-emerging-authors
"Only original content. Articles, poetry, photography, videos, recipes, etc."
There are billions of times more content being produced online that one can consume, 99.99% of this content is made available for free and 99% of this content is being produced for free. The concept of incentivizing the creation of completely original content solely for being consumed on steemit.com (a still half-assed UI) was a bad idea, yet Ned, Bernie and bunch of whales have put their SP behind this concept through guilds. I have no idea to what extent the people at the top of this platform are clueless about content marketing but I am very scared about my investment if it continues anywhere near that path.
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In a vibrant market, I would agree with this, but we're not there yet. There aren't enough people here to determine what success or failure really means, so voters and guilds need to make judgement calls about what will attract people who are off-platform and don't have the ability to vote for themselves. Right now, I think that new visitors need to see some, "I can do that" content, and authors need to be encouraged to post about topics other than proposed adjustments to the curation rewards curve and flagging.
I agree totally about the focus on original and substantive content. Even busy.org can't really be like traditional social media, because they share the blockchain with steemit and posts there are probably still going to get flagged by people on steemit for "link spam." It really smothers organic behavior. Of all changes in hf17, I'm most encouraged by the elimination of the penalty for more than 4 post per day.
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This is a very, very small community in its nascent stage, so it's only natural that a vast majority of content is mediocre. There's no one "guilds". There can be guilds of various kinds. It simply means a collaborative curation effort. I would love to see collaborative curation focusing on non-original, engaging content. If there's a Curie focusing on original content, there needs to be guilds that focus on non-original content. That the community hasn't bothered in over 6 months makes me fear that maybe people are just interested in original content on Steemit... Yes, the content may be mostly mediocre, but it's the best Steemit can do right now.
Since you seem so strongly against original content and you are on of the top investors, I'd encourage you to take the initiative and promote curation of non-original content etc. I'm doing my bit by voting on such content, but of course, we need like whales like yourself to support such initiatives to have any impact. All the best.
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This wouldn't remove any issues caused by curation rewards.
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I would reduce the incentive for people to delegate their SP onto guilds for the content reward. I'm not saying it would remove all issues I mean it would reduce it over time.
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I don't think it would, people would take whatever money is on the table.
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Absolutely. I haven't posted my long overdue notes on my thoughts of the problem with bots, but I have commented here and there on the importance of consciousness to evaluate content that will represent the reality of what is valued.
A site that is being evaluated largely by bots, or autovotes, doesn't represent an accurate evaluation of the content being produced. Of course I concluded the same as you with regards to investors: who the hell would want to invest in a content site that's not even evaluated by human consciousness? Game-picking gambling-mentality free-lottery tickets are also not helpful in that respect, no longer term value and simply a drain of 0 value to the platform. What investor wants that being pumped by whales? SteemSports was the first, but that crap is still around.
Curation rewards drive people to go for valued targets, and inhibit evaluation of content for content, which is another big thing I push. Getting rid of them is good all around as I see, I agree with you.
Regarding comment votes, look at how much I vote for posts vs. comments, and look at my % votes on posts vs. comments. I'll tell you now, I think I vote for as many or possibly more comments in a day. And I usually keep it at 100%. I don't care about curation rewards ;)
Great point!
Same here. Not KISS at all like you say lol. Copies the problem so a separate economic sector, I concluded such in my review of the proposal in the comments when it first came out. It was a very long comment LMAO.
Yup. Wake up people.
Resteemed to support a better step forward.
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I also would like to repeat this, because everyone needs to get out of their bubble and face up to reality. I've been researching a lot of about what outsiders think of Steemit and it's not pretty what I've found. We need to all face reality before the reputation of Steem degrades further:
This is the truth. Absolutely.
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Absolutely. I've always been for no more bots, but apparently everyone says they are here to stay so that closes down the argument before even looking at the negatives it creates. No matter what the issues, no point in even discussing them apparently because "bots are here to stay". Who wants a social media site evaluated not by people? LOL. It's pretty obvious the low value that gives for outsiders... Face reality indeed. Thanks for adding that feedback.
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I am in complete and total agreement with removing curation rewards as you have outlined and shown with clear logic. As it is right now, the experiment of paying people (mostly whales) to curate has failed.
Let me repeat, it is a failure.
If any value is to ever be created from this website, it will need to focus on ORGANIC CURATION, ORGANIC READERS AND ENGAGEMENT. This will happen ORGANICALLY because readers, writers and curators will do this. In fact, they will do it better than bots. I am saying this despite the fact that I am currently being rewarded with curation rewards. But to me, it's not even worth it because this system is NOT working well. We need to listen to the cold, hard truth, admit failure, and improve.
Creating a valuable site is WAY MORE IMPORTANT than having our little numbers go up in our individual accounts. As snowflake said, if Steem goes to zero, our numbers will be worthless.
@dantheman, let's do this. I am completely behind this 100%. Building something that is valuable and that we are all proud of is of central importance. Enough of the fakery. Enough. We need drastic improvements over people bickering about half-eaten chicken wings.....scraps, mere scraps. We are all better than this. We can make this place valuable, if we're smart about understanding what creates REAL VALUE.
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Emotional words don't make much sense.
We all know current mechanism is not working, but it doesn't mean your solution will work.
Please explain why removing curation rewards WILL work better (than a linear reward distribution mechanism, or the flatter curve proposed for HF17).
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A linear reward curve will improve power concentration but people will still be voting for thing that pay instead of things that they like.
Another positive when eliminating curation rewards is that active users will have more power, and if whales are smart about increasing the value of steem they will refrain from voting to let the minnows/dolphins ( who actually buy steem power) do their thing.
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IMO whales won't refrain.
If they will they should have been doing it right now.
They'll do it perhaps in another way, for example delegate to a small group.
If you don't like the things that whales are doing, why not get rid of stake weighted voting at all?
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Nope, if they refrain from voting now they will lose a lot of curation rewards.
If whales delegate their power to many minnows/dolphins this is good for the platform and value of steem
I dont have a lot of voting power but without curation reward i would delegate a lot of it to minnows.
It's not that I don't like what they are doing it's that the only way to improve power concentration is to incentivize whales not to vote.
If 1 user = 1 vote then you have sybil issue and no incentives to buy steem power
I've just discussed with smooth and he told me about your simple curation rewards system, i didnt know about this I thought your post was exclusively about linearity which is why I didn't bother to read. Ima going offline now we can speak about this more later.
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But they'll gain more value if it can leads to a increasing price of each STEEM.
IMO delegating to select few will solve nothing. Also there would be more vote buying.
IMO it's not the only way.
Have a good day/night!
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Social media sites are all about emotion, if your economic model doesn't cater for that, you're bound to fail.
Having said that: predicting the future is very hard. If the new curve doesn't yield the results we want, maybe even proving the underlying economic thinking wrong, we can pick up the discussion about abolishing curation rewards again.
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No idea why this post is $6.14 when it has 207 comments and 305 views.
broken.....
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It's a controversial subject or/and whales are not ready for this
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I'm a semi early adopter and I am all for this. When something is not working, I'm all for fixing it.
The reason you're getting resistance is the same reason most empires imploded. Humans are stuck in a downward cycle. SAD!
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People think it's working because they are getting rewarded, they are being blinded by the numbers in their wallet. When the price goes to zero they will probably realize that it was a waste of time trying to get as much steem as possible and that they should have focused on growing the actual value of the platform.
It usually takes a crisis for humans to come together for a common goal, when you look at natural disasters its a perfect example. It's too bad we have to come to this.
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this is kind of what i feel like when i'm on steemit nowadays. People are surrounded by liquid gold that they think has a lot of value, but it's only pooling around their heads. You and I are on the exact same page. When will everyone else wake up?
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Just scaling energy back a bit. I've got some other projects going right now. @ocrdu
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When 1 steem = 1 satoshi
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Long time no see. You're not singing The Song I hope?
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The reality is: YOUR POST IS VIRAL. It's good that it's on the trending page, but quite sad that it only made six bucks. Obviously, if i was a whale, I'd put my 100% behind this post, FOR THE COMMENTS ALONE....
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I heard using the tag "chemtrails" helps to go trending and get big payouts: https://steemit.com/funny/@felixxx/trending-lately .
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I will say though, I invested only my time, so my perception is different. I also have a very different understanding of money. To me, money is just energy. But when a bad path is followed for too long, that's when people usually lose it all.
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I don't think your perception changed because the way you acquired your steem, i think its just a mindset, some people have it some don't, some people are visionary and others are stuck in the present.
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The current curation awards encourage upvoting and discourage flagging. Because flagging earns no curation. This is actually a pretty big deal for me.
There would be much more flagging without curation awards and this would hurt the platform.
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Downvoting is an integral part of the system, it has become an issue because of power concentration.
If you remove curation rewards, users will have a much bigger say and so they would be able to upvote any downvoted posts back up
Please read this post I explained this in more details https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/my-take-on-what-happened-to-karenmckersie
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Great post. Very well written.
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If this proposal were to go through, then my question would be:
What value would there be in accumulating or buying STEEM Power?
If holding STEEM Power has no benefit then one would constantly be selling STEEM to convert it to a measure of value. The constant selling would drive the price of STEEM down which would further encourage one to sell STEEM as soon as they get it from a post or comment.
I am trying to understand what the value of holding or accumulating STEEM would have if there was no benefit in holding it. What ever system is developed has to uphold a market for STEEM where people want to buy it because it has value.
Thanks in advance for helping me understand,
Mike
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If curation rewards were eliminated, I'd favor a portion of that now freed up rewards pool to go to higher interest rewards on holding SP. This would give one reason.
I think the ability to influence payouts and reward content you care about is a good incentive on its own. It will also become more self serving in a way as community features roll out. Voting activity i think will naturally become more insular. Most people will interact within a few communities of their interest. If a community as a whole has more SP among its members and is active and engaged, they all will earn a greater percentage of the rewards pool. When I vote up someone and thereby give them a few Steem power, the next time they upvote me, their vote is more valuable to me. It's not a planned collusion, just a natural organic behavior that creates mini economies within the broader network.
I also recall an app someone built months ago, where you could look and see your top supporters on a post in terms of the payout value their votes contributed. Anyone remember this and have a link? Imagine Patreon and KickStarter type programs set up with Steem. Transferring Steem directly would be one method of funding, but clearly votes can fund projects as well. I think voting is genius because it is essentially a tipping system that doesn't feel like taking money out of your own pocket, though in a roundabout way you are. Rather than paying directly into funding campaigns, I could envision people buying and holding SP with the value of their votes being calculated in $ amount by an app such as the one described, which would determine supporter level. You could essentially power up and earn KickStarter and Patreon backer type rewards on a regular basis without ever touching your underlying principle investment.
I'd also support communities having some kind of cost either for formation or upkeep that would require Steem to either be held as SP or burned like with promoted posts now.
In short (too late!) I don't see curation as the killer reason to hold Steem and think the elimination of curation rewards could be viable.
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That's a good point and I've said this before steem will have so many different kind of content that is completely irrelevant to most people that curating this content will make no sense. Why would people care about upvoting family picture of people they never heard of? This is why the concept of curating for money is flawed because it goes against the natural will of the people.
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Steem power by definition is meant to give you power. Unfortunately 99% of people don't understand the purpose of steem power because only 0.2% can use this tool.
The benefit of holding steem power is to increase your influence, it's like a game the more you have the more power you have.
Eliminating curation rewards would make this game a lot clearer because it will give influence to those who are active.
In terms of financial incentives steem is like any other crypto, if you believe in the project and think its value will increase then you accumulate some, as the price increase the amount of reward you will be able to allocate will also increase.
This is already happening because the system is broken, it was meant to be a system where steem power gives you influence but turned out to be a system where only 0.2% can play the game. This needs to be reversed asap to bring the value of steem back up and eliminating curation rewards is an easy way to do it.
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Influence on this platform has no value unless the platform succeeded already.
Chicken and egg.
This is not necessarily true. Big players still have more influences even if curation rewards is killed. They're active: they're curating manually or with a bot or delegated to others.
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I'm not sure I agree with this. To me influence is key to bootstrap the platform, if you give it only to the 0.2% steem is going to be stuck.
Yes whales would still be able to upvote but they will do it a lot less without curation reward and they will be a lot more likely to delegate power to others ( like you said). Most whales are aware that to increase the price of steem they need to give their influence to minnows/dolphins ( who actually buy steem power) but because of curation rewards they are discouraged from doing it.
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100% agreed with that. May I translate you article to Russian network Golos?
Resteemed and promoted.
Here is my translated version of your article: https://golos.io/steem/@everythink/otmena-voznagrazhdenii-za-kuratorstvo-perevod-posta-snowflake
Please give me a note if your don't like that I've published it on Golos that way.
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Sure, no problem
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Thats offtopic but that the dear voter doesn't even give a click when a full-time marketer like me needs 100 to print steem on lighters shows that nobody cares about working (not posting a link on twitter but hard physical work on the street) to get new users.
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What, if you eliminate curation rewards, then I am cashing out and moving on! Curation rewards are half the reason I am here, that would be a deal breaker! Had too remove my automated robotic vote on this post.
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I'm going to sound a little harsh here but at least I'm being honest and its nothing personal
Steemit doesn't need people like you who do not engage in the community and only let their bots running to earn a few pennies per day. It needs users who actually engage, bring their friends to the site and interact with the platform the same way they would on any other social media site.
You bring absolutely no value to the platform by just letting your bot blindly vote and not getting involved in the community.
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I almost always vote at 100%, and I only upvote what I actually read. At 3000 Steem Power, my vote doesn't carry much weight,so I may as well throw all of it behind what I read and find interesting.
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Excellent....let's remove these unwholesome curation rewards! There is so much potential within the Steem economy, the curation rewards won't be missed in the end. If dan is in favour and clearly many others, let's get on with it...
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A very small change that could help us find our 'Product-Market Fit' and thus find those hungry new users that we could attract to Steemit!
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this was a bad idea to being with, and it remains a bad idea.
Lets print money to pay people for doing nothing while depending on people to curate for free isn't a business model, its a fantasy.
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Still not getting the notion of increasing the value of steem I see..
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i get it. this just won't do it. youre not going to increase the value of steem by printing more of it and giving it away free. it doesnt work that way.
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What do you mean printing more of it?
Steem is already given out for free.
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@sigmajin has shown that mining curation awards with bots has not proven to be a problem.
Removing curation awards takes away one of the only positives I see on the platform.
Why would I care enough to curate if the payout is the same either way?
I'd let my steemvoter run, but I would also stop spreading the love as much,...there wouldn't be a point in running my vote power down.
Fix the curves and keep the rewards,...
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Maybe because you like what you read? And you want to rewards a fellow steemian?
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Yeah, I'd still vote, but the game wouldn't hold the same appeal.
I recognize that your way could be given a chance.
Hopefully the new curves will mitigate against negatives you list.
I have noticed the lack of 0.0 payouts in cashout, so the top must have come down some.
Maybe the whales are voting less?
Trending is definitely lower.
I think most of your qualms are corrected with a less extreme reward curve.
Cutting curation rewards would be akin to chopping of an arm and a leg, they are 1/3 of the equation here, and major surgery.
As a low reward content creator, no fault but my own, curation awards make being here a little more joyful as I can earn something, at least.
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There is still a huge disparity in rewards because whales are discouraged from spreading their votes due to the curve. There are a ton of posts who have a payouts between $0 and $0.5.
The formula for trending has changed recently which is why you see post with $5 on trending.
With the steem power that you have even if you are a really good curator you would earn less than 5 cents per day. You are better off just posting content and upvote for things you like instead of things that will pay you 5 cents a day that you don't care about.
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No it didn't. The reason you see that is more voting on comments (mostly by abit), but the comments were always part of the formula.
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My perspective on sp sharing is the guilds going incognito and the vote weight staying at the top, or spread to their sycophants.
Can you give me a perspective that makes this more palatable?
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Okay thanks for the clarification.
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I think the new curves need to be given a chance.
I don't like taking from the whales, but lowering the top may be the only way to up the bottom.
The bottom is where most users start, perhaps we should encourage their continued interactions by making them count in the math.
Nobody hangs out long enough to start seeing a benefit the way it is now.
I'm guessing that whale voting has come down, when I started beating this drum some time ago there were plenty of 0.0 payouts in cashout.
The only way I see that growing under the current curve is if the top has lowered the amount they suck up.
What would you think of adding a curve in the math that takes into account author sp?
More sp gets bonus for the votes that you get.
I don't think it can be either/or, but by adding another dimension to the math that makes holding sp more valuable to authors is a good idea.
If an author has Xsp the weight attached by votes would pay out less than an author with 10Xsp.
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My opinion on the curve is that it's unnecessary and that it tries to fix an issue that doesn't exist. ( self voting) and could be solved by downvoting if it ever became a problem.
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I'm a musician, how 'bout while we're at it, we say "No more rewards for anything but music!"? Just because you don't use curation rewards to make an income doesn't mean other people don't. People are not going to vote here unless they're paid to do it. They can already do that on Facebook or Instagram, where the website (app) is actually aesthetically pleasing, and doesn't look like a fricken word document with a blue header (and a crappy editor). Eliminating curation rewards would send away not only curators, but also authors who are rational and realize that the platform can't sustain itself anymore and decide to get out while they can. I am deeply frightened that you people are bringing this back to the table. Read this when you get a chance: http://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/
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Opinion found in some economic theories, not fact. People are motivated by other things than money as well.
And kindly stop referring to economics 1.01, it doesn't prove your point, and there are many economic theories to choose from, most of which are flawed. Also, it doesn't make you look knowledgable, it makes you look arrogant and condescending, and it is as close to an ad hominem as makes no difference.
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It's not about who earns money on the platform, you need to get rid of this mindset of " how you are going to profit from steem" and instead think of how " to increase the value of the platform"
Curation ( 80-90% of which is done by bots) bring absolutely no value to the platform, a post whether its music, art or photo will bring value to the platform.
They are not voting today already, 90% of votes is done by bots.
How eliminating curation rewards will send authors away from the site? Why would the platform be any less sustainable? I don't follow The platform will be a lot more sustainable, users will have more influence which will incentivize them to buy more steem power and the site will be a lot more valuable in the eyes of investors. Do you really expect businesses to integrate a content reward system run by 90% bots? It's not going to happen.
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New users don't care about increasing the value of the platform. Like it or not, they're in it to make profit (as are most voters and authors) (I.E. you're being paid for this article therefore you are making profit)
That means 90 percent of author rewards are also currently given out (diversified) by bots
I and many others would leave
Because most of the voters that give the platform its value would leave. The loss of voters would cause demand for steem to leave, and the value of steem to plummet.
No, it will alienate many people who are voting to get curation rewards (causing them to leave and leave only authors) and steemit to look unattractive to investors.
Yes, Google uses bots yet many businesses depend on their search engine.
Again, I'd recommend you read this article:
http://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/
As well as this article:
http://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics3.asp
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You still didn't get the point. Profit will come as a form of increase in steem value if the platform is more valuable.
Solid argument.
Curators do not give the platform its value, authors do.
Eliminating curation reward would increase the amount of voters actually, today almost every vote is a bots. By removing these rewards active users will have more power and so will be voting more.
Again people are not voting robots do. This platform doesn't need curators , it needs people who actually bring value to it, by posting and engaging in the discussions.
Google picks up content that people have 'voted' for with their click, so unlike curators google actually 'vote' for content that people want.
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I'm done arguing about this. You are just rephrasing what I debunk, and changing the definitions of words. Please resume fighting for a cause when you understand what it is you want.
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It's funny that people like you who havn't invested a single penny into steem is trying to give an investment lesson to people like me who actually put their money where their mouth is. Pretty hilarious actually!
Edit: That's an observation I made recently is that most users who have not invested a single penny in steem care a lot about growing the number of steem in their wallet but real investors who spent their hard earn money mostly want the value of steem to increase. This is not speculation, it's a fact which can be verified by reading comments here and checking user's balance history.
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[Nesting]
Flagged another comment for trolling.
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This is not trolling, it's the cold hard truth.
I don't know if you paid attention but cmp2020 has been insisting on the fact that I don't know what I am talking about eventhough I made an argument for each point.
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You've repeated this figure many times in this thread but it is wrong. Only about 20-30% of vote power comes from bots (vote count is meaningless in a stake-weighted system) and even that probably understates the human influence because a lot of that voting may be performed by a bot but is decided by a human primarily for influence and not profit-maximizing reasons (for example deciding on their favorite posters or types of posts they want to support, or in some cases as a delegated vote decided by another human).
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20-30% really? do you have any stats or something i can check? Because when i look at the voting paterns all i see is a few votes before 30 min, then the bulk of all votes come at 30 min and then only a few votes after that and occasionnaly i see post with another round of bots after 30 min which will add a lot of votes. I also regularly check posts that biophil's bot is voting on and it has this exact pattern, about 90 votes comes in at 30 min, then hardly any votes after that.
I think what would be interesting to know also is what percentage of the curation rewards are earned by bots..
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clayop and someone else did a study a week or two ago and came up with that number. it can only be approximated because nobody knows exactly which accounts are bots but it isn't surprising when you look at most of the top stakeholder and curator accounts by amount, most are not bots, they are either human curators or guilds (blocktrades, val, michael, dan, abit, ned, etc). You are paying too much attention to number of votes, and yes there are many small bot accounts/votes, but that isn't what matters.
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I didn't noticed you were talking about stake voting, Id argue stake voting is not really the metric to look at because as you said it's only a few individuals. I was refering to 90% of the people. The amount of users using bots is what's important and i would say it's very close to my numbers.
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Upvoted for a great contribution to the discussion. I'm not sure I agree with eliminating curation rewards (there are pros and cons), but it should be part of the conversation.
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Can you give me the cons please because I honestly can't see any :P
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Others have written on this. It's not my expertise. But I'd see the main cons (to eliminating curation rewards) as being:
(1) A lack of incentive to keep the site organized and clean. I know you addressed this in your post, but I still feel it would be a risk to throw that away (until proven otherwise, maybe on a testnet first?).
(2) Part of me believes this thing works much better when people have a variety of things to do, can have fun, and stay occupied. A larger comment reward pool will be huge, since not everyone wants to write long articles. I'd like to see the site design accommodate (and the community be able to accept) some shorter length content and alternative types of content as well (news, links, video, music, FAQs, etc.).
But the idea of paying people to vote is very interesting. Voting is something a lot of people can do and it may attract users who are not as interested in posting or commenting.
Could rep systems be tied into voting somehow, so that there still would be some incentive to curate the site, aside from a monetary one?
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Hm..what do you mean exactly? Sorry but didn't get this one
Eliminating curation rewards will have a better impact on comment rewards than a reward pool for comment. The latter will only replicate the current system in the comments, essentially you will have guilds voting for their comments, whales voting at 100% and people whining because they only made 1 cents on a long ass comment, it's going to be a miniature version of the current system in the comment section.
I personnaly don't think its interesting enough( certainly not with current incentives) to warrant blocking improvement on power concentration, which is the big elephant in the room.
I don't think having users just upvote and not take part in discussion brings any value to the platform, upvoting good content is overrated, anybody can do it and good content is subjective, it depends who actually voted for it.
This sounds very interesting.
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The first part was the notion that curation rewards provide incentive to keep the site well-organized and clean. Regarding comment rewards, I think they'll improve this place because people will have more to do. I had only mentioned that in this context because curation is another activity which might draw users and I'd like to see a lot of various activities available for people here.
Your point is well taken about the value of upvoting being questionable. If there are enough users on the site and if voting power is widely distributed, then perhaps the community can handle the voting without being paid for it. I'm guessing the site would trash up in a hurry if we tried it now, but I'd be quite open to running an experiment.
How about two weeks with no curation rewards? See what happens.
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Well organized and clean is subjective, how do you define this?
What do you mean trash up? Do you think if we remove curation rewards people will start upvoting plagiarism and pedo content? lol
Like I said in OP, the reputation of users will be on the line now if they start upvoting trash because there will be no excuse to say " oh it was my bot"
The simple fact that an uvpote is worth money is enough for people to not upvote trash, on sites like reddit the majority of people upvote good content, it's a misconception to think that users will suddently upvote bad stuff if you remove rewards.
I'm all for it. Even a week is fine by me for testing!
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One may argue that curation trails will have no income to sustain. But I think curation guilds can have alternative way to compensate curators, e.g. writing a post.
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You have certainly a good point!
I'm now 2 months active on the platform and do notice that posting rewards are much more rewarding than curation rewards.
I do curate; I vote for those posts I liked. But I may only vote 5 to 10 times a day on posts since I generally only vote for posts that I've read and like. I do vote on comments; When in a conversation I generally do vote for all the replies to show my appreciation.
Interestingly, with all the bots in the network, I can create a 'shit' post, get 1 or 2 people voting 100% on it and 100 bots and I've earned more than days of voting. Although I'm advised to setup auto voting, I still have kind of an issue with auto voting; Auto voting does not help content/post quality at all; Also auto voting may increase my rewards through curation rewards, I think the total sum of rewards I can get by maximising auto voting is still very very small to author rewards. Most of the days my voting power stays way above 90%.
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The only reason I upvoted this and commented is because I want money ;)
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I'm new here and still studying and learning at the same time.
Curation rewards also made me think that only whales can benifit
the rewards, since I'm a neophyte to this site, somehow confusion about how to earn. My little contribution to the site made me feel unimportant. But if @snowflake can convince those people involved in the curation for the betterment of the community, I would appreciate it very much.
Thank you for the enlightenment.
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Well i was looking down the list of your posts and thought this one was suitable.
First of all, an apology for any 'bad-mouthing' you may have seen from myself. I received this comment on this post that made me think i'd been too harsh - although I have tried my best to keep to data and facts.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@diabolika/how-to-live-off-poor-steemians-and-help-the-rich-get-richer-full-guide-and-128526#@valued-customer/re-abh12345-re-valued-customer-re-abh12345-re-diabolika-how-to-live-off-poor-steemians-and-help-the-rich-get-richer-full-guide-and-128526-20171113t184713258z
Ok, now that's out of the way. Business.
If the recent delegation project you've undertaken isn't proving suitable for you, would you consider an experiment...
Basically, you delegate me your SP, you take my curation rewards.
I'm thinking with your SP, I'd be aiming for 280 SP a week. This is a rough estimate, based on the price of Steem at .85$
As you may (or may not have read) I'd like to throw most of this at the newer accounts, try and spot the potential longer termers. However, this may not be most profitable so i'll need to balance it out to make the rewards up.
I'm on discord/steemit.chat if you want to discuss further details.
Or you can just say, not interested!
Cheers
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Agree with all your points why curation currently is bad.
Removing it is better than keeping it.
However what we nees is to have a loyalty system for peoplw that are active. That is what curation rewards should do. So instead of getting rid of it i would reward users activity. Ie. We should reward people for showing up regularly over time and reading and voting for stuff.
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Eliminating curation rewards will naturally do that by giving active users more influence.
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I think removing curation is better than the curation we have now. But I think rewarding users to show up and consume content regularly is optimal. The value is ultimately driven by users showing up and consuming content. I think rewarding them for this with curation reward is good. However the current system instead of rewarding users to do what they want skews the behavior of users into a voting financial game that has nothing to do with consuming and liking content and ultimately corrupts the value creation process in its current form.
Would you agree with this or do you think there are other mechanism at play?
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I agree, the current curation rewards system do not encourage engagement.
This user is living proof https://steemit.com/@coininstant/comments This person complains about eliminating curation rewards but he is not involved in the platform at all, he just lets his bots running and do not participate in the site. This is what a large majority of people running bots do which is why posts have so little views, nobody is reading them because curation rewards do not encourage engagement. If you eliminate them, more influence will be given to active users and engagement will be rewarded.
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I myself am an example as well. When i log onto steem I click a bunch of up votes because i think it is profitable.
Then i will read some articles and vote for them if i like them. But most of my votes are only to make money.
I hate it. But i also hate to be stupid and if there is free money to be picked up by this game i can't help myself. But this needs to be fixed.
Thank you for this article and congrats to making it to the top of the trending page. I hope the steemit team notices.
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[Nesting]
No, I've invested something more valuable to me than money, my music (I spent months writing my symphony). I also invested money I earned that I had in bitcoin. I also kept the money I earned here on the platform ($800). I am a high school kid with no reliable income to invest. (Thanks for trying to make this personal).
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Sorry if you took this personal I am not trying to say that not investing real money is bad, it's just an observation that I made. Real investors with big money don't care about earning 10% annum through curation, they want 10-100x.
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As one argued this thing 12 days ago in this post, I agree with you.
Voting is using power on reward allocation, and it can give psychological satisfaction. Arguments saying "No incentives on voting leads no votes" is very narrow understanding of human behaviors from the perspectives of both economics and psychology. People are already voting without any incentives, and even paying for being influential (Some streaming services have this business model).
For me, the only concern is reducing incentives to hold SP from the perspective of investors, since curation reward is now a way to to earn profits (which is totally wrongly aligned with the original goal of "curation"). Inactive reward can be one more option, or we can increase SP rewards.
Voting should not be free lunch
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The incentives to hold SP will not be reduced because eliminating curation rewards will make the platform a lot more valuable, it will improve power concentration a lot and would make it a lot more appealing for business to integrate because of this very reason. You say curation rewards is a way to make profit, can you tell me one single investors who earned profit from curation reward? There are none because the value of steem has only gone down.
I think that inflation can be used to incentivize people to buy steem, I actually created a post about it.
So yeah I think using a portion of the reward pool to distribute to stake holder is a good idea and I also liked the idea of only rewarding inactive users.
I think steem power should be removed entirely, many in the community agree with this. It would be a lot less confusing for newbies to have 2 currencies instead of 3. Basically your voting power would be the steem in your wallet and users would be able to vote with steem that is at least 7 days old to prevent double voting.
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I intentionally used "make profit" to make it easier, but actually it's compensate loss from inflation. SP holders who don't curate are losing about 8% annually, but if they curate, it will decrease to around 4~6%.
Meanwhile, STEEM holders are losing 9.5% a year, since they don't get 15% of inflation reward. Merely removing curation reward keeps the difference (15%) same, but if we change curation reward to inflation reward, the difference will become around 33%.
Details can differ, but I think the core idea is the same, as I mentioned in my last sentence. Voting is not free lunch.
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financially speaking, the 3% difference is just too small to justified the time and effort invested.
IMO, the psychological satisfaction sometimes weight much more to a curator than any financial rewards.
and I'm agree with @snowflake in his point that, the increase in platform-quality and thus the value of SP could eventually benefits SP-holders more.
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I agree. I am just playing devil's advocate. You can find that I already suggested this argument last month and got a huge backlash.
But there's no significant efforts and time if one is using bots.
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Exactly.... that's the main reason why curation reward should be removed.
curator who don't use bot will probably get much less than 1%, so the curation reward is actually penalizing those who perform good curation manually.
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I agree with most of your comment but I don't think this conclusion is certain:
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this isn't a bad idea....
This is lol-bad. Lets print money and give it away for free... that will increase its value. Spoiler alert -- it won't.
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Money is being printed as we speak at a fixed rate and this won't change if a portion of it is used to distribute to stakeholders.
Steem is already being given for free, not sure what you are talking about.
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No, its being given away in exchange for work. Just because you don't pay for something with money doesn't mean you don't pay.
You want to take the work out of the equation, because some are doing a bad job of it, and just pay people for doing nothing.
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Yes its work. Its just not good or difficult work (and its not work that should be rewarded). The solution is to reward the work that is actually valuable, not to not offer rewards for the (important) function and depend upon people to do it for free out of the goodness of their hearts.
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I'm sorry but running a bot is not work and doesn't bring any value to the platform.
Authoring is work and provides value.
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In an extreme sense yes, but voter apathy is widely observed too.
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Less vote is an obvious result, but voter apathy is not necessarily true. And kind of apathy seems rather good than wrongly incentivized votes.
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210 comments, is no joke. this is a huge topic. Who knew!
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You actually bring up a great point. People will think SteemIt is some sort of scam when there is like 1,000 upvotes and like .10 cents.
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Having people view, comment then vote should be rewarded. That would be a win win for steemit authors and community. Why should a few bad eggs take away something that was a tool/reward for everyone.
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nice post i followed you
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I actually wouldn't mind trying a hardfork "cycle" where curation rewards are omitted. I curate because I love to read, comment and upvote. I rarely look at what I've earned in curation rewards because... well, I think most of them are about .001 anyway.
But if we get rid of curation rewards, PLEASE also get rid of the vote slider for accounts with less than 100m vests! It is so pointless when I see minnows voting 1% because they heard somewhere that it would "hurt their vote power."
But piggybacking on what @neoxian said about flagging - there must also be a striked difference between flagging and downvotes. Flagging = major offenses and potential to get nuked. Downvotes = difference of opinion and no effect on earnings. My opinion is based on the fact that no one likes a thumbs down - but when it affects one's wallet that's a whole new world of butt hurt.
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This kind of mentality will be gone so you won't have to remove vote slider, everyone will be voting at higher percentage because they will finally be voting for something they like instead of something that will earn them curation rewards.
I don't really see the point of a flag, there is no such thing at the blockchain level. There is only upvote and downvote so even if something were to be flagged on steemit, it wouldn't be flagged on esteem8 or busy.org or esteem. Like I said above downvoting is an integral part of the system, the huge unbalance in power made this feature controversial when in fact its essential.
When the voting period is still ongoing the rewards are not in your wallet yet
Please read the following post
https://steemit.com/payout/@timcliff/everything-you-need-to-know-about-potential-payouts-and-flagging-for-new-users
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I think my pure linear proposal serves this better. https://steemit.com/curation/@abit/benefits-of-pure-linear-reward-distribution
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Pure linear is a no brainer to me but I think dan is against it for some reasons. Also curation rewards bring some issues that can't be solved with linearity, for example the fact that nobody on the platform ever votes for things they like but instead vote for things that will ean them money, this is really bad imo, steemit can't be taken seriously with this type of content evaluation.
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[Nesting]
True.
So the point is to give more rewards to the people who upvoted "good" posts/comments. So the design can be:
The more SP downvoted that post, the less curation reward the upvoters will get.
Makes sense?
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I'd like to hear more of your own analysis/opinions but not only following Dan. Dan is not god.
That's addressed in my post: with pure linear curation reward distribution, no matter you vote for what you earn the same curation rewards (unless the content is downvoted by others who sacrificed their curation rewards), so you'll vote for things you like and/or you think is good.
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How is pure linearity going to make curation rewards the same on all posts? Rewards on each posts are not going to be the same and so curation rewards will be different too.
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[Nesting]
This is a good question. If you think a thing should be done in a way then you will try to find how to do it right. If you think a thing can't be done then nothing will be done.
For example, we can set a fixed price for every SP when used on voting, then pay the voters according to the weight of the vote * SP.
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I don't see the point of having curation rewards if all posts give the same curation rewards...
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[nesting]
It encourages active participation since not voting does not earn the same reward (which as I commented elsewhere reduces susceptibility to abuse since most of the user base is presumably not abusers, but abusers may be very active voters). And it isn't quite true that all votes earn the same since there is a still a risk that the post would get downvoted causing the voter to lose rewards, so this discourages abusive or careless voting.
The upcoming curve will be somewhat similar to this, at least on the whale scale. Not for the bulk of the user base though.
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The obvious way.
in a pure linear system, your vote is always worth the same amount of steem on a post, and you always get 25% of that rebated back to you in the form of curation rewards.
So if your vote is worth $10 in a pure linear system, its worth $10 no matter what you vote on. If you vote on a post that gets no other votes, the post gets $10 total rewards and you get 25% of that (2.50)
If you and 10 other people with the same vote weight vote on a post, the post gets $100 total rewards, for a total of $25 curation rewards, that you guys split 10 ways (2.50 again)
If the post gets $15.00 in reward, your votes were 2/3 of the total SP (worth 10 of the 15)... the total curation reward is $3.75 and you get 2/3 of the curation reward (because you have 2/3 of the vote weight) for a total of $2.50.
As abit mentioned, the only potential wrench in this works is downvoting.
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@smooth
Please explain how a linear curve would make every votes earn the same curation rewards? This doesn't sound right to me because the curve will not remove the curation algorithm so the rewards will be flatter but you will still have the same system in place.
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[Nesting]
I saw you upvoted one of my earlier replies, thought you've got it. However, after seen your new reply:
So it seems you still have difficulties. Please check my new post https://steemit.com/curation/@abit/design-the-rules-inside-a-linear-rewards-distribution-mechanism , wish it helps.
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This message was posted yesterday before I spoke with smooth . The curation reward system that you proposed is to me a lot better than the one we have now.
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Hey, I am trying to catch up. I am still new to this community. But have been seeing many good things with this community, And received a lot supports from people. Your article is very interesting. I also tend to agree with your conclusion. But how we can make it happen? Thanks
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Eliminating bots would be great, but without incentives, who would vote?
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The less users are voting the more power is left for active voters. For example if you were the only person voting you would be able to allocate the whole reward pool yourself)
Who would vote? Active users who want power and pretty much everyone who cares about the platform.
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There arn't many active voters. Even people who post a blog post tend to write and run, they rarely stay and read a bit (you can tell by the number of pageviews).
If the bots disappeared, there would be no upvoting at all because "active users" can't be bothered or simply don't have the time.
BTW - I think the 1% votes are stream votes. That is, there is a manual voter who is followed automatically via autosteem or streamian by other voters. The amount you get is determined by the manual voter. If they vote 1%, then all the people following automatically also deliver 1%. If they vote by a higher percentage, you get a higher percentage by the autovotes as well.
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This is completely false. There would be a lot less voting that's for sure but votes will carry a lot more weight.
And there would be a huge incentives for people to vote because their vote will be a lot more powerful since less people will be voting, so active users will be rewarded by being given more power/responsability within the system. This will also incentives users to buy more steem as they will see a direct increase in influence.
Why do you want a ghost town trying to appear like it's full of people? This is a deceptive strategy.
It's a lot better to have less voting coming from real people, that would reflect the reality more.
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If there is no curation reward, and no bots, then people will have to spend time with no reward. I suppose a few people with no jobs and nothing else to do will vote.
People have busy lives, they haven't got the time to vote. The only reason any voting happens at all is because of the curation rewards, and people use bots because they are too busy to do it manually.
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That's utter nonsense. I work long hours and vote manually every single day. I read loads of articles. You can't just broadly brush stroke everyone based on your own experience or opinion. Also from being fairly active on here I know others who do the same as me
Aimed at rose not snowflake who I agree with
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There are 4.5 billions likes on facebook everyday without any monetary gain, where do all these people get the time to upvote?
You see, the biggest problem with steemit is that it is focused too much on money, people don't come here to be with their friend or share pics with family, they come here to make money and this will be the downfall of steemit.
If you want people to stay you need to advertise the site as a social media site not as a money maker.
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Nonsense. There are other motivators than money. Your opinion can easily be brushed aside based on the many people that vote without getting any noticable rewards. You should consider that real people in the real world may behave differently than is dreamt of in your economic theory.
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You're bringing up great point. I'm in the top 100 for the best curation score for the past 50 days so it seems I would be bias for keeping curation reward too but I tend to think we might be better off without them. It's still a very complex situation.
I don't agree with the comment reward pool being a bad thing. I think this will be a good thing. I was skeptic at first but I'm not exciting to see what will come out of it.
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What's going to come out of it is not gonna be pretty, unless whales change their behavior which I don't expect with curation rewards.
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We'll see. You might be right.
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I understand that even less, my voting power I believe isn't even $0.01 so what's the profit in that? To make any money an article has to be upvoted by people whose votes are worth something.
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If curation rewards are eliminated your upvote will be worth more because less stake will be actively voting.
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Who gets more psychic income (by being influential) will vote, while for-profit bots obviously won't.
Assuming an extreme case. If no one votes except one person with 100 SP. Now, 100 SP makes any changes on rewards, but in this case he/she can give a whole reward to a post/author by upvote. If the one were you, would you vote or not? That voting must be much more enjoyable than now, and will give more psychic income. I would say, he/she definitely will vote.
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Boy you got me with psychic income, now I'm really lost.
I really don't agree with you, but I am open minded, maybe you are right and I am mistaken, no problem.
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How can you explain donations? It has no financial incentives, but even rather has costs.
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Again I think this discussion I think is out of my league, I am trying to understand but now you bring up donations, I see no mention of donations on any of the comments.
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I think this should be very straightforward, I read a post I like it I upvote it, the curation reward is like a carrot to incentivate me to vote, if I don't have that incentive I will probably vote less, heck everybody would vote less, because I wouldn't read that many posts (I actually read them and vote accordingly) but if there is no incentive I would probably just read posts whose tags interest me, not those of my followers, just what interests me, some people would lose my vote and on a sad side note I might miss some excellent posts. Now with the bot thing I think we agree get them out, they are not needed. But somehow we have to get good rewards for the better authors and eliminating curation is not the way, at least I don't think so. And we need good authors they are the ones who bring in more people.
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If you are ignoring satisfaction, which is an element of the utility maximization function, I think you have very hard time to understand this discussion.
Do you think that no one will vote if elimination of curation reward is removed?
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@gduran
You got the point. I read a post I like it implies you are satisfied by the content (psychic income).
Let me say technical things. Currently, a user upvotes when
curation reward + satisfactionis greater thanthreshold. If no curation rewards, a user will less vote, as you said, only ifsatisfaction > threshold.Bots have zero satisfaction (they don't read it) and very low threshold. Usually, the threshold would be
operation costwhich is lower than $1/month if you are using voting trails. But if curation reward becomes zero, they have no incentives to vote because no cases will meet0 > threshold.Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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Nah, if there are a million posts on the platform but he/she can only give out one vote, perhaps he/she won't vote, for the fairness, or lack of resource to review all posts to find the best one.
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He or she will vote while there's less financial income but psychic income still remains
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That's not my point. Please read carefully.
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Did you say a voter won't vote because he/she cannot real millions of posts? It is practically impossible and not logical. Voting occurs when a voter expected to get higher benefits (financial and psychic) than threshold after consuming each post. He/she doesn't need to real all posts and compare them.
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[Nesting]
I will have zero psychic benefit when I'm responsible to give one reward to the best one but not the first one I read. My threshold would be high.
Also there will be thousands of posts that nobody will read or vote. People will say it's unfair.
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@abit Got your point. It was an extreme (unrealistic) example to highlight psychic income from being influential and to rebut the arguments "no one will vote"
People can't say it's unfair when they don't vote, as like one who didn't cast vote cannot complain "Trump it not my president", since he/she passively agreed that he/she will accept any results (by not voting)
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Somewhat indepdent of @abit's point it isn't even clear there is a psychic benefit to voting (especially given that votes are public and one might be attacked or harassed if one votes in a manner that others dislike). You can point to sites like reddit where people vote with no reward but that isn't exactly the same thing because: 1) the votes aren't public, and 2) it doesn't involve taking responsibility for allocating money (or much of anything).
I have no doubt there would be voting without curation rewards, but there may be a lot less than where the prospect of rewards can offset natural apathy or discomfort or not wanting to be held accountable. Less voting by a larger share of the community (presumably most are not abusers) also means more susceptibility to abuse (as with low voter turnout allowing less popular candidates to win)
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They are subjective. Some may not want to ones preference in public while some other may enjoy being influencial and showing support to other people.
I agree more voting is better, but only if they are done with right processes - read, evaluate, and decide. Now, many bots are stupid and I also know if I post, bots will upvote me and give around $3 anytime.
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