This proposal is submitted for consideration to the Steemit development team and all community members actively involved in the Steemit platform’s ongoing development.

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I am proposing the Curation rewards algorithm be adjusted to compensate curators based on the VALUE of the curation SERVICES they provide to Steemit and in turn to Steem holders. Specifically, Curators upvoting unknown and low paid authors will get more rewards. This will improve the value of Steemit and $STEEM.

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To begin the discussion from a productive position I believe we must start on the same page. I propose the following terms and definitions to be assumed in the context of this proposal.

Terms and Definintions:

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Curation Reward: A financial incentive in place to compensate users for services that add value to the Steemit digital repository.

Curate source

cu·rate2
ˌkyo͝oˈrāt,ˈkyo͝oˌrāt/
verb
verb: curate; 3rd person present: curates; past tense: curated; past participle: curated; gerund or present participle: curating
select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition).
"both exhibitions are curated by the museum's director"

Reward source

re·ward
rəˈwôrd/
noun

1. a thing given in recognition of one's service, effort, or achievement.
   "the holiday was a reward for 40 years' service with the company"
   synonyms: recompense, prize, award, honor, decoration, bonus, premium, bounty, present, gift, payment; More

Digital Curation source

Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars.

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How do curators add value to Steemit by voting.

1. Curators sort individually through the vast amounts of content on Steemit to effectively introduce multiple sources of subjective evaluation to the maximum number of posts.

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Imagine a beautiful state of the art library with the best facilities and over 50,000 librarians. Inside stacks of books are strewn about on the floor in a pile reaching the ceiling. All of the bookshelves in the library are empty except for one labeled “Best Selling Authors”.

Further optimizing sorting.

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Steemit is generating staggering amounts unevaluated of content on a daily basis.
This is the pile of books on the floor. Steemit is paying people for the service of sorting this content but currently they all review, organize, and evaluate the same small subset of posts.

I propose giving additional weight to curator rewards when a user is evaluating relatively “Unsorted” posts and authors. Specifically, metrics such as the dollar amount earned on last N posts would suffice to measure the current quality of information curators have provided regarding a specific post or author. These small changes incentivise multiple sources of subjective evaluation for the majority of all created content. By maximizing the amount of content which has been evaluated it will reduce errors from individual weak sources of information and increase the number of high-quality high-value posts identified.

The system should financially incentivise users to sort through this “pile of books”. Each user need only look at a couple of posts before every single post has multiple weak sources of evaluation attached. This will further improve the efficiency of intelligently organizing this ever growing collection. Fortunately we have tens of thousands of curators and a system in place to compensate them. The more of the content that can be evaluated from multiple sources the more accessible, organized, and valuable the content becomes.

2. Curators forming a consensus on the highest quality content with the most value to Steem holders.

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This is analogous to all 50,000 librarians maintaining the “Best Selling Authors” shelf. It is by far the most important, active, and valuable shelf of the whole library. Currently, Steemit curators are doing an excellent job of organizing and evaluating high-value content. It does not require a disproportionate share of the curation reward resources to achieve this.

Objectively comparing value of curation services

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There is value added when users contribute to forming the consensus on a popular post. However, the Nth curator to confirm this information adds FAR LESS value to the platform than the curator performing the (1.) Sorting service of identifying less known content. The latter person is identifying possible high-value content which may not have been otherwise discovered or monetized. While the former merely supports information we already have regarding the value of a post.

Discovering new high-value content that would have otherwise gone undiscovered is immeasurably more valuable than additional confirmation by a single curator that a popular piece is also subjectively valuable to them. The rewards should reflect this value differential more accurately.

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In conclusion, I will reiterate.

I am proposing the Curation rewards algorithm be adjusted to compensate curators based on the VALUE of the SERVICES they provide to Steemit and in turn to Steem holders. Specifically, Curators upvoting unknown and low paid authors will get more rewards. This will improve the value of Steemit and $STEEM.

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Thank you for your considerations,
@pjheinz

If you have constructive feedback or specific suggestions on implementing changes to the Curation Reward system please join the conversation in the comments section.

EDIT: The intention of this post was to start a discussion on optimizing the use of curator rewards to improve the value of Steemit and price of $STEEM. This is not to claim I have the perfect solutions. Rather to, put forth some of my opinions on adding variables to reward curating authors who are not very popular.