It’s sad to see that authors are getting rewards at a 3:1 ratio over both curation and interest, and 4.75:1 over witnesses, but some people still whine and cry about how authors are getting such a “small piece of the pie.” Authors currently receive more than half of all blockchain rewards - and where has that gotten us so far?
As you noted, an author assumes absolutely zero risk by signing up and posting their content. Why are they being catered to moreso than people operating nodes or buying STEEM and staking their tokens?
And why does nobody seem to comprehend economics and investing? Better incentives for investing and curating would likely lead to better content discovery and higher STEEM prices...which is good for authors. While everyone cries about author rewards being unfair, they fail to grasp the entire theoretical purpose of staking and curation incentives - and don’t allow the system to operate as designed.
Frankly, I don’t give a shit about “authors” taking a general haircut on rewards percentages. And I say that as someone who has created a lot of content on this chain. We continue to miss the huge effin’ boat by constantly kowtowing to the demographic that has the least economic impact on the system and assumes the least amount of risk in it. This needs to stop.
Authors will earn more money when the system can properly function. With the ratio of rewards directed to authors, the system will remain broken...and nobody will win, including authors who aren’t making much anyway and still dump tokens at the currently low prices in order to “get paid to blog.”
interesting point, as someone that has a partly knowledge of how this work and i may be wrong, you missed one big point. number of authors vs number of witnesses. let's say there is 100.000 steem to share. authors get 52.100, witnesses 11.100. lets say there are only 10.000 authors, it is 5,2 steem per author. and there are 200 witnesses, that is 55,5 steem per witness.
one of the things that i don't know about steem, if there is no authors, would witnesses still make steem?
I didn’t miss that point at all. Authors/Commenters are actually taking in 56% of the reward pool. The rest is divided between curators, witnesses, and interest.
By far, the largest single group of users and potential users is content consumers. Most people are not bloggers and don’t want to be. That is the demographic that would benefit most from curation rewards and would represent the exponential growth that everyone wants to see.
But what do we say to them? ”You don’t matter! Put your money in and give it to authors who need to get paid!”
If there are no witnesses, who would sign the blocks where authors put their content? Author rewards are a byproduct of actual investment. They aren’t needed in order for the blockchain to function or for speculators/investors to speculate/invest.
that is what i did not know. so technically steem does not need authors to exist and witnesses and investors will still earn steem?
no problem with giving more to consumers/curators. but to curate/consume you need something to consume.
As a continual buyer of steem i'm not worried about the nothing to consume bit.
Your ratios aren't as tragic as you indicate. Further declaiming against those seeking to increase retention, rather than letting it continue to slide is pejorative and whingy. We're losing content creators, and that's the source of value of Steem. Authors are not coming here, and Steem won't increase in price unless many do. The charge that decreasing author incentives further will decrease retention further is not unreasonable.
Implying emotional immaturity to those that point out that fact is nothing more than projection.
You're also wrong about risk. Spending time creating is a form of investment, and folks abandon their investment when they abandon Steem because the incentives seeking to keep them creating value in Steem are insufficient to justify that investment.
Rent seeking is antithetical to investing. It extracts value from the investment vehicle, while investors seek to increase the value of the investment vehicle to create capital gains. You're just projecting again, this time your own lack of understanding of basic investment principles. You double down on that when you point out you 'don't give a shit' about decreasing incentives to the only group that creates value in Steem. As long as you seek to extract that value as rent, you'll not see the system functioning properly, and that will be what prevents it.
Top witnesses are earning around $8k per month. It's ridiculous to claim authors are out earning them.
You’re still not getting it and you’re arguing some points that I never made. I would encourage you to actually read the posts I linked earlier today. Most of your questions/claims have already been answered/addressed for the past two years.
To this point specifically:
This has been repeatedly demonstrated to be completely backwards. Prices do not increase because users/authors increase. The influx of new users comes after prices rise and then they leave as prices fall.
Why does that happen? Because all of those precious “valuable” authors only come to extract value from the system, then abandon the system at the first sign of decreasing rewards. Meanwhile, the invested users, whose investment and voting habits gave those authors their profits, are left with another few thousand abandoned accounts and people whining about how unfair everything is...again.
So, no - authors who come after the price spikes don’t really do much of anything for the platform. If they stick around and keep their stake in the system, then that’s a different story. But then we’re talking about new stakeholders who are incentivized to power up (or stay powered up) and curate, not just authors who dump tokens.
And then we’re back to the same issue: Incentivizing non-bloggers to power up and contribute to the system so that it properly functions, which is the entire purpose of curation rewards. And again, this was addressed and discussed in the linked posts and the plenty of comments on them.
One last thing:
No top witnesses are making $8K per month right now. That would mean that they are earning over 26,000 STEEM each. Check current prices and earned witness rewards.
Good job conflating creation of value with marketing of Steem. Authors come here because they hear about Steem from price increases. They leave for reasons. Price decreases.
As to every other point I made that you ignore, well...
Apparently you can't into $=Steem.
Uhm, ¡Holy crap!
And your point is...?
@ats-david
And my point is... that you must READ a lot more!!
Yet you are probably the most valuable author here
Well, that’s kind of taking it out of context. :)