My biggest pet peeve since the day I onboarded here almost 4 years ago to date is the ridiculous curation lifespan of 7 days. I mean, you can't be fuckin serious. This counterproductive algorithm encourages shitposting instead of producing well-thought-out and evergreen content with constant updates
There are lots of great tutorials, as @done pointed out, and other thought-provoking analyses that don't get some love simply because most users just stumbled upon their content 8 days or 8 months later. Some Hive stakeholders are yet to come, some of them don't know yet what the fook a bitcoin is or cryptocurrency in general
The moment they do and come across this content they think has helped solve their issues and/or answer their question meaningfully, it's no longer possible to use their voting power to reward someone
What is happening right here is comparable to a content factory where time quota is part of how your salary is calculated. This resulted in (1) rapid production of quick expiring products, in which people don't read anyway (2) users writing for bots/web crawlers instead of biological humans
Choose your path wisely
I agree with you in general, but I am not sure what that system would look like. If the reputation system meant something, maybe authors with high reputation would be rewarded with longer payout windows. The problem is, it opens the door to abuse.
Sounds like we should discuss this idea more thoroughly. The 7 day window has always been a problem. Peakd tried to fix this with a tipping option that is however not used very much.
@tipu curate
To be fair out interface for tipping was a bit lacking and we hope to improve it to make it more obvious and easier to use and way faster. Also easier to do on mobile.
Recently someone suggested a really simple solution for this. Frontends have to do some work to better navigate the users to take advantage of this possibility. It's all very simple - when a post's payout has already been paid, you don't vote on the post, you instead make a comment and set the post author as your comment's payout beneficiary. Then you upvote your comment. This will have the same effect as you voting on the author's post. Plus it will leave a comment on their post, even better.
Does this meet your requirements?
Increasing the post payout period would increase memory requirements for a hived node. In fact, there was a time during Steem days when posts paid out in two separate payments (7 days and 30 days), and the 30 day payment period was eliminated (for performance reasons, I've always assumed).
Also, practically speaking, most votes of economic significance are cast in the first few days, because the majority of voters with substantial stake are voting on an "attention" basis as posts appear in their feeds, on ranking lists, etc. So I don't believe that rewards would change much for posters if the reward period was increased.
In fact, some recent analysis of voting patterns done by @arcange using HiveSQL showed that most votes are cast in the first few days of the posting and this likely means that the reward period could be reduced to 3 days without causing any significant change in reward distribution. But no analysis has been done yet as to what performance benefits that might bring.
I think that the idea mentioned by @borislavzlatanov seems like a good workaround for "evergreen" content, and your idea for potentially automating this process via frontends also seems reasonable, but the frontend dev teams are all pretty busy right now, so I'm not sure where such an idea would fall vs their other priorities.
As a further aside, I think that authors are to some extent indirectly rewarded for past posts when they make later ones. This is part of a reputation building process. Authors who consistently make posts that are liked by voters often end up getting placed on automated voting lists, so in a way, they continue to be rewarded for those earlier posts. This is part of why long term posters often achieve some of the highest post rewards.