For those of you who have not heard of Steem, it is “A protocol for enabling smart, social currency for publishers and content businesses across the internet”.
What is Steem
Steem is one of the very few blockchain projects out there with a working product that has been in use for more than two years and has more than a million users (10,27,790 users as on 2018–06–07T06:32:40.430Z).
Most of the people have a misconception that “www.steemit.com = STEEM” which is farthest from the truth. The irony is that even many of the users who have created accounts on www.steemit.com are also not aware of the difference.
www.steemit.com is just one website or interface for STEEM blockchain.
STEEEM is the underlying blockchain that empowers many websites and Dapps like steemit.com. There are many popular interfaces like www.busy.org, Esteem, https://d.tube/ , https://www.dlive.io/, https://join.utopian.io/ and https://alpha.steepshot.io/browse/hot
The challenge
After having used Steem for couple of months I can think of at-least a couple of challenges that the platform has. But the one important handicap from the perspective of using Steem/SMT for a third party application is the timelimit on earning potential of your posts. All payouts occur exactly 7 days after your post or comment is made. So only the up-votes you garner in the first 7 days materialise monetarily.
Steem has a duration for 7 days for deciding the worth of articles. we can look at it in two ways
- It is kind of agreeing that the life span of the articles are seven days.
- Steem incentivises new content on the platform.
Upvotes on Steem platform are a feedback mechanism to decide how the resource pool should be distributed amongst the contributors. When this is the case I don’t understand why we need to set a limit of 7 days for the upvotes. While the upvotes after seven days are not considered in distributing the resource pool amongst users who add value, that feature is still present. So it also opens up suspicions that the team might have kept it open to see how that works and may start taking the votes beyond 7 days into consideration for distributing rewards pool at a later stage.
An example from Lukestokes’ feed
For example if you take Lukestokes’ post about smart cash https://steemit.com/smartcash/@lukestokes/my-smartcash-story
you can see that there was a payout of $58.29 and there are 362 votes casted till date. By querying @steemsql I was able to find out that 228 votes led to a payout of $58.29. But there have been close to 134 votes that were cast after the payout time. Not many people are aware of the 7 day restrictions initially. Generally when they come across some good they up-vote under the assumption that the author would get some rewards which is not the fact.
Half Life of content
If you consider the half life of a facebook post or tweet the limit of 7 days might reasonable. But posts on Steem blockchain can be similar to facebook posts or tweets but most of the times they are similar to posts on medium which are longer in length and are generally like commentaries or tutorials. For posts of this nature the limit of 7 days seems to be a limiting factor.
Is this stifling adoption of Dtube
Even during comparison of d.tube with youtube.com this is one major shortcoming which I think is holding back d.tube from going mainstream. As a video content creator it is only fair that you expect to make revenues from the video over the long term and not just for the first week after creating the video. If you look at some videos on youtube you will realise that many good videos are not discovered for a long time but once it gains momentum it goes viral to break records.
Steem shouldn’t deprive good content of long term revenue generating opportunities
By sticking to the 7 days deadline we are limiting the revenue generating opportunities of Good content on the platform. If we need to have serious content writer and professionals from various fields then we need to address this. We were planning on building an application of late and Steem blockchain was a perfect fit as our produce was in the learning domains and content centric. But due to this 7 day limitation we have put it on hold and are searching for a better alternative.
Possible Reasons
I could only think of couple of reasons for this limit.
- It would have made sense to keep this limit in the initial stages of the platform as new content had to be incentivised. While this might have made sense in the initial stages, I think we should get rid of this limit now. I have also come across scenarios where people duplicated their content time and again as they had spend time in creating the post but they didn’t find enough audience first time around and though the post is getting upvotes post the payout time they are not rewarded any amount for the same. If we let go off this limit we can avoid this duplication of content. Also when writers know that there content has better revenue generation potential even if their content is discovered at a later, they will spend more time on research and making their articles worthy of readers time.
- If the limit is not kept then calculating the curation rewards might become too costly calculate. I am not sure if this is entirely true. Would be nice if somebody from the dev team can verify this.
Solutions
I am not sure if removing the limit altogether is a feasible solution. So my suggestion is to create a new token called “Steem Power Perpetual” which would be in addition to current set of Steem, SB and Steem Power Tokens. This can be an inflationary currency so that the existing reward pools are not affected. There can be a separate rewards pool of SPP tokens which will be distributed on similar rules as that of Steem Power but it would account all the votes casted after the previous SPP Payout. Since this is an additional long term token the vesting periods for this can be much longer and also to reduce the computational load the calculations can be done every month or so. Users will get paid in this token towards the end of each month which will also give them a feeling of fixed returns. As the articles get more popular and SEO friendly these articles will also have more scope of fetching higher monthly payout. Quality articles which are timeless will have better potential for earning SPP.
How will these SPP tokens gain value and how much they be valued.
Like any other token the value of this token will be based on demand & supply and utility. Since this an additional and long term token people who feel that having high quality timeless content on the platform will increase the value of the platform can start staking these tokens. Since I am of this opinion I wont mind buying these tokens from various authors. To make sure that authors don’t have a lockin may we can have a lock in after the first transfer. That is the first person who receives the tokens will not have a lock in but the person to whom he sells will have a lock in. I am not sure how feasible this is, but whats the harm in thinking out loud :P
Can you think of any utilities for this coin which can increase the valuation of the coin?
Instead of the auther getting the payout after 7 days of publishing the post.
The author would get the rewards in 7 days of recieving any upvotes.
So every single upvote comes as an payout in a different time
I think that is a good idea. That will be a real time payout in terms of user action instead of being centred around content. But this would add a lot of over head in terms of calculations and I don't think we are ready yet. This might be the case if the computing power increases by another couple of orders ;)
Again I don't like cat posts but I had to upvote it because of this insightful comment of yours.
An AI that analises our data couple of years ahead might infer that I like cat posts but whereas I was just trying to make sure that this comment of your gets rewarded.
Seven days is a reasonable amount of time to reach an audience. Some content is timeless and amazing but granting more Steem to new creators is what keeps this platform going. If more rewards were going to those who created content weeks ago there would be less incentives to make new posts- especially if there are high quality old posts. Also curators should be rewarded more if we extend the time but not necessarily the ones who curated first. Your proposal changes the entire Steem economy.
The author can simply repost anything if they want the payout to continue beyond 7 days. This current system also promotes serials and series, I don't want to see more rewards going to someone who posted a funny meme 3 weeks ago.
I agree that granting rewards to new creators is what has kept the platform going. I am not saying that we should grant a major portion of the rewards for the evergreen content. All I am saying is that there should be a way to reward evergreen content. There can be multiple solutions to this. We can create a new token who value will be evaluated by the community over the time. I think that was also there is the minds of those designed the platform initially because the votes are getting registered in the blockchain. it is just that they are not monetised.
While I agree that reposting is a solution I wouldn't be comfortable doing that myself. Also it need not necessarily be posts. See for example your comment contributed to the post but I am not able to up-vote your comment as the threshold of 7 days has crossed.
We dont necessarily need to make changes at the blockchain to begin with. We can try other approaches and then push it into core if makes sense.
You could read other content of mine and upvote that. Or you could simply respond to comments of yours within 7 days, if you don't have time upvote them or another post of the Author's. Responding to a post after 15 days and saying you cannot upvote it, is part of the problem, not the solution. I don't mean to be rude, but it is rare that someone replies after a 7 days. The 7 day limit is reasonable.
Ive been thinking about building a solution to aolve this problem
Let me know if u are interesting in working with us
@knircky I would love to. Share some more details regarding what it entails and if you have any ideas already. You can reach out to me on discord gokulnk#4937
How it Work You can Check Here
It seems to me a very interesting proposal, a permanent voting power. More proposals like these are what we need to continue growing as a platform. regards
I think this is an excellent perspective. A good article or video should be able to be monetized even after 7 days. It can take a longer time for an article or video to be discovered and later go viral if they have great content.
I sometimes also feel an article I wrote that has been paid out is already "dead".
I have gone through that feeling myself and can feel your pain. I am hoping that SMTs will provide alternatives to this. Let us see.
Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:
https://hackernoon.com/building-a-case-for-steem-power-perpetual-spp-token-e0976386a44d
@gokulnk has set 1.000 STEEM bounty on this post!
What is a bounty exactly?
A bounty is money sent to a post to be distributed to the users commenting on it. It provides a way to reward users directly and works in addition to the steem/sbd they receive from the blockchain. It works independently of SteemPower.
You create a bounty by sending any amount of sbd/steem to @steem-bounty together with a post-url in the memo.
How can I earn a bounty Users are then competing for the bounty by writing their answers to the post in comments that will achieve upvotes from the community and especially the bounty creator. The money of the bounty gets distributed to all top level comments of the post at the same time when the post is paid out (7 Days after it was written). How much everyone gets depends on the votes the comments received. The sender of the bounties votes are weighted higher so that she decideds where 80% of the bounty money goes and all other votes determine the rest.@steem-bounty does all of this for you automatically. You can use this service to automatically pay out a challenge, ask a hard question or simply to reward the people that interact with you.
Read more about how it works, even in different languages here.
Congratulations to the following winner(s) of the bounty!
excellent information friend @gokulnk I want to have a solution to solve this problem, but if you would be willing or interesting working with us it would be great greetings
Please feel free to share your solution. I am already thinking of one solution but for the SMTs have to be ready. In the mean time we can use Bitshares for implementing a solution but at best it is going to be a patchwork.
¿Hola amigo @gokulnk! seria una buena solucion, esta propuesta que mencionas,
"Steem Power Perpetual" que se sumaría al conjunto actual de Steem, SB y Steem Power . Puede haber un grupo de recompensas separado de fichas SPP que se distribuirán según reglas similares a las de Steem Power, pero contabilizará todos los votos emitidos después del pago SPP anterior. Como se trata de un token a largo plazo adicional, los períodos de consolidación pueden ser mucho más largos y, los cálculos se pueden realizar cada mes, en ese tiempo se tendria mas oportunidades que vean y voten tu post
What interesting information friend @gokulnk, I would like to be able to solve this problem, greetings.
Let me say @gokulnk that this publication is excellent. Your proposal to increase the deadline for the expiration of the post and to distribute the rewards, is something I've thought a lot too, because I think a very short period.
In which those who are dedicated to the production of videos are very disadvantaged, and obviously, and that premise only only last 7 days is a big disadvantage in front of youtube.
And also you give a solution proposal with the creation of a tocken ... that's why I tell you that it's excellent, because not only do you present the problem but you give an altenative solution.
Definitely think high is not at all problematic, in this case, hopefully it is so high that those behind this platform can hear it.
Thank you.
If SMTs make it sooner than end of this year, it might make sense to create a new SMT token for this and distribute the rewards accordingly. I am still figuring out SMTs and am not sure if we will be able to come out with our own custom rewarding models. Since the calculations finally needs to be done at the blockchain I am assuming that there will be some restrictions.
An off chain solution might be best for now until the details become clear.
I upvoted your post https://steempeak.com/spanish/@josevas217/redes-descentralizadas-moda-o-necesidad because I liked your comment and the date threshold was over :)
Hello @gokulnk, I realized that the time had already ended, but it is always good to carry in spite of that. And thanks for the support.
Nice view