Let's be evil for a minute

One of my most effective methods in system design is to temporarily assume a goal that is opposite of the ones I want, and explore what a system designed for that goal would look like. This can help us understand more about how the system work, as well as helping us avoid well-intentioned mistakes and bad actors who pretend their goals are similar to ours.

So just for the space of this post, I'm going to set a villainous goal: I want to prevent new authors from gaining a foothold on Steem. How should we go about that? My proposal:

Increase curation rewards

Author rewards are available to everyone equally, while curation rewards are directly tied to Steem Power. So the more of a post that goes to curation, the more of its rewards will go to existing users, particularly orcas and whales. Even as a dolphin curation isn't a notable source of income, and wouldn't become one if it were doubled or quadrupled. That means we can move income from the posting class to the whale class easily just by increasing the percentage of a payout that goes to curation.

Superlinear rewards

"Superlinear" is a weird word and not especially clear, but what it would mean on Steem is that a vote would have more value if it were cast on a post that had more votes. Essentially we're incentivizing voters to vote on authors who are already popular, and disincentivizing them from voting on anyone new. The least-valuable votes cast will be the ones from people who find new authors to support, which ought to make sure there are as few of those as possible. But there will always be some people like @thedarkhorse and @davemccoy who actually like doing that, and we need to find some way to punish them too.

Synergy

Fortunately these two proposals work really well together. By making votes more valuable when cast on popular content, and increasing the percentage of post payouts that goes to curation at the same time, we can make sure that voters who stick to reliably-popular content grow their accounts and become more powerful on the site much faster than those nasty people who seek out and support new posters.

In fact, we can pretty much guarantee that iteration of the incentives in this system will eventually lead to almost everyone on the site voting on the same ten posts every day, because their rewards will depend on it.

If you're already a top author on Steem, congratulations, your income is about to go up dramatically. Unless you do something that drops your posts out of those ten, anyway. You'll have to make sure you never say anything just a little bit wrong, because if you're not in the top ten, you're nobody.

If you're not already a top author on Steem, well, sorry. You're probably never going to be, but you can put a ton of unrewarded effort into trying, and maybe if you're incredibly good and incredibly lucky you'll be able to acquire the earnings and anxiety of being one of the Chosen Few for a while.

Wait, did we just turn Steem into Youtube? That was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Everybody celebrate!