There were discussions about this. Some were in favour (most noticebly @thecryptodrive), but the majority was against it; including myself.
I can only speak for myself, but the reasoning was quite logical. The SPS is very similar to the reward-pool. It's just more fine-tuned on achieving results, instead of just having a playground for people to co-operate. So taking the cut from the reward-pool makes sense.
In contrast, witnesses are the backbone of Steem and its ecosystem; which includes Steem Engine & co. Taking from that source would possibly mean pulling the rug from underneath.
Witnesses in the TOP 20 are making roughly 9280 STEEM per month; backup-witnesses are making far less (roughly 1/4 or lower). 9280 STEEM at 0.4 USD is ~3712$. (Brutto; tax has to be subtracted) Infrastructure is roughly 400$-1000$ (or more); depending on factors like full-nodes, hivemind-nodes, etc. But this only includes hardware costs, not the costs associated with the individual(s) behind the witness. Besides the obvious requirements as in securing & monitoring nodes and reviewing code, there are many unspoken requirements from witnesses; taking part in discussions, answering questions, helping new/old members, etc etc.
Now imagine BTC would drop to 3000$ and STEEM were to stay at its current level; this would result in a 12 cent STEEM. 9280 STEEM would suddenly only be worth ~1110$ (Brutto). At that point, maintaining a witness would still be possible, but a far bigger risk-factor, as the costs of running Steem nodes are essentially only rising (MIRA is helping, but TOP 20-30 witnesses do have to run high memory nodes in order to keep replay-duration low).
Especially, as infrastructure costs are really just the fundament. And you want to have experienced witnesses that feel their time is valued, which includes adequate payment.
"Even a symbolic 1 or 2 % would have gone a long way to showing that we are all in this together."
I'm obviously not arguing with you that a 1% cut wouldn't really matter in the great scheme of things, but then why even bother with doing that, when the logical thing to do is to reduce the reward-pool in favour for the SPS pool (as I explained above).
Just because people would have a better feeling, as in we're all in this together? That's just sugar on top. Because what if I told you, that we're already in this together?
I'm a witness and developer for sure, but I'm also a content creator. Over my 2 years here on Steem, I've produced 283 posts. That's probably not as much as really dedicated content creators, but its still something. So yeah, the reward-pool cut also effects me directly.
I appreciate your thorough reply and the work that you do as a witness.
I understand your projections of a stagnant price or a lower price for Steem. On the other hand all of this is being done with the hope of increasing the price.
I also believe that witnesses have the best chance of benefiting financially from SPS since many are building as witnesses they can also make proposals and get paid even more with SPS.
In actual fact my bigger concern is the voting curve. I've invested a lot of money in Steempower and I'm very concerned that my vote for commentors on my blog will be negated.
I don't buy votes but I do give my own posts a 100% upvote. Keep in mind that on most of my posts I give away between 5 and 10 Steem in prizes. I feel that my business model will be destroyed. Maybe I'm wrong and time will tell.
For the first time in 3 years I'm powering down in order to be flexible enough to make drastic moves if necessary.
One last thing. Too many changes all at once. The last time it was an awful hardfork, not smooth at all.
Thanks for mentioning me as a proponent to taking from the witness pool. I have been heavily negotiating for witnesses to shed 1% as you know. I do believe strongly in securing the chain but I also feel that 1% is not that much and the public relations between witnesses and the community benefits would be far greater. If we don’t it just creates an us vs them scenario and breeds witness conspiracy theories.
I don’t understand one thing, you say that if BTC drops to 3000, Steem drops to 12 cents, but when BTС grows by 2-3 times, from 5000 to 14000, Steem does not grow, it remains at the level of 30-40 cents. It looks like a game with only one goal. Why it happens?
Why not take from witness rewards and make the remaining witness rewards a proposal in the SPS system?
Why not do so with the whole rewards pool?
That was exactly my thought in the original SPS discussion.
Another alternative is that SPS proposals, if approved, can be paid directly out the same reward pool that currently pays posts and comments (making the observation that both a "proposal" and a "comment or post" are fundamentally the very same thing: making a transaction to the blockchain that says: "Please vote to pay me").
I think in both cases this is premature if only because the existing implemented, tested and ready-to-deploy code does not work that way, but also because I'm pretty sure people want more confidence in seeing SPS do something useful before more tightly integrating it into Steem. (Those with experience seeing a nearly-identical system work on Bitshares may be more confident, but not all of us have that experience.)
I know, and I hated it 🙂 ... But the more I look at the what seems like failure of the rewards pool to reward valuable contributions while the inflation pulls the price down, I’m wondering if it’s the road we are heading down.
The only way that would ever work though is if we had a front end that was good enough on it’s own to actually attract people, engage them and make them want to stay or perhaps a separate reward mechanism (Content token?).
As a social media platform we are lacking a way to encourage people to enjoy and engage and so it’s now just all about rewards. As silly as it may sound - emojis, “claps” or other “expressions”, ways that make it easy to find content and other users with same interests, resteems with ability to add comment etc would make it actually fun to interact on the platform... and maybe there wouldn’t be as much focus on an upvote.
I also agree that the SPS has to prove itself before additional funding is considered, as we really have no idea what to expect at this point.
Agree with you about emojis, etc. Also the UI is very clunky, and between that and RC costs, it discourages casual interaction and humor in the sort of way that drives reddit, twitter, etc. It needs a serious re-imagining, like maybe comments are removed from being payout items and are just comments (which would make them much cheaper). As well as emojis, etc. of course.
As for the dynamic split between SPS and the rest of the pool, I'm not sure why you hate it. Stakeholders would vote on the split one way or another, and if stakeholders aren't sold on the existing reward pool mechanism pulling its weight, sooner or later it is going to get drastically reallocated or even zeroed out by hard fork. You can't stop stakeholders from doing that, and the economics of it may become too compelling for it to not happen (if Steem doesn't die first). Giving those same stakeholders a direct vote on the matter doesn't seem all that different to me.
Yes I understand that stakeholders are already essentially deciding where the rewards pool goes, as they should, and if things continue a change will most likely come.
My concern was directing it all to a system when we have no idea what it will look like. A system that will rely on participation, through voting, to ensure the decisions are made. When it’s in the code it’s hands off in a way. If it was directed through the SPS it seems like it would require stake holders to be more actively involved is all... and I question whether they will maybe? Maybe that’s not a logical concern.
Ultimately my distaste for the idea was that I think we need to see how the SPS works, how stakeholders respond etc before taking such a step.
Fair enough, but I believe (could be mistaken) that at the time I even said that it shouldn't be done now but if at all in some future iteration. So I guess we are in violent agreement.
This idea that comments should be removed from the payout pool entirely is interesting. Right now, because I can reward comments like posts, I want to. I want people to interact with me, and I like when they do, and when I see a comment I like, I want to upvote it.
But if all comments were simply "decline reward" I can imagine two feasible workaround scenarios. One, there would certainly be a bot developed that you give posting permission to, and when you "liked" a comment, it would go to the user's most recent post that hadn't paid out yet and deliver your vote value there, while letting you leave the $ emoji on the comment (or whatever)
Or two, people would just stop thinking of comments as posts. It would take away valuable functionality, I think, but this EIP is already taking away most of the valuable functionality of steem as a crypto-rewards social media site, so why not that, too?
Idea three would be that if you want to reward comments and interaction, you pay them a tip either directly (as Steem has very cheap on-chain transfers, in fact fundamentally they really ought to be cheaper than votes, although I'm not sure this is currently the case) or via a tip bot, which already happens on other social platforms.
You should submit those feature requests on https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues
There is a little handful of devs from the community, including me, who are working on fixing bugs, adding features to Steemit (see my recent posts).
Features that requires more effort could be funded by SPS in the future.
Why the do so with the wowl rewards pool?
I am a bot. I turn comments into owl related puns.
Interesting!