About 4 months ago, I made a post comparing reward distribution on Steemit and its younger brother, Golos. You can read that post here.
Recently I thought that it might be interesting to check out if there had been any changes since then.
When it comes to Golos, there haven't been any revolutionary changes. Golos token price, after testing its bottom, returned back to its February level, so the reward pool is almost the same now as it was then. However, there aren't any top-1 posts collecting 10+% of total reward pool as it used to be in February; now, there's just 3-4% of TRP being paid out to top-1 posts, which corresponds with what we have here on Steemit. With the number of daily posts doubling since February, average payouts on Golos had been bigger than on Steemit, but now it's slightly less, just about $4.50.
As for Steemit, as we all know, there have been some changes indeed since February.
With Steem's price jumping from below $0.20 to over $2, the total daily reward pool went from about $7000 to ~$90,000.
It's no surprise that the daily number of posts also increased tenfold over this time, from 1300 to 13,000. This has left the average payout per post almost the same; it's about $6.50 at the moment.
Apart from many other changes on Steemit, there's the most recent - the so-called Equality Hardfork, which increased vote weight for accounts having less SP, and was meant to decrease the influence of Whales on payouts.
At first thought, the hardfork should be making the reward distribution more even. The fact is it though that it's simply not happening.
By the time I made my February survey, 70 top-posts collected 50% of the total reward pool, leaving the other half for the 1230 remaining posts.
Now, what do you think? With the number of posts increasing tenfold, what is the number of posts collecting 50% of the TRP? Do you expect it to be around 700 posts instead of 70 before?
Well, no, nothing like that.
Nowadays 50% of the TRP is going to the same magic number of 70 posts, leaving 12900+ posts to struggle for the other half of the TRP.
That makes me think that concerns about people had for the post-HF19 landscape, where people would begin voting for their own posts and comments in greater numbers, simply didn't materialize. If that had been the case, we would have seen the center of gravity for Steemit rewards moving towards an "average" Steemian, but this hasn't happened.
Instead, it looks like "old Steemians" are sticking to their limited list of favorite authors, and the Long Tail of new Steemians is just getting peanuts.
It would be interesting to see the future dynamics of reward distribution. For now, though, it looks like the gap between top performers and newbies is just getting bigger, despite this newly-introduced equality.
You make a good point. Thank you for sharing!
Thank you for my first ever @randowhale vote)
You're welcome. It's just a small token of appreciation for your ongoing support. I appreciate your support. 👍😎
This is actually quite fascinating. I think it speaks to how difficult it is to bring about equality in practice (assuming that is the actual intention behind HF19). I'm still in the minnow range as far as SP goes, but I am making money off Steemit and able to increase my SP through writing. So even if it's not completely equitable, working this system to get ahead is still doable.
As for the whales still upvoting their buddies and not going much beyond that, that is human nature. Whether in real life or online, once we find our social group, we tend to stick with it. Reaching out is something you have to consciously work at. It won't happen by itself. So if the whales aren't making intentional efforts to reach out and spread their votes around, it's not going to just happen.
Thanks for the link to my article. It's how I found yours. I upvoted and followed you.
Looking at my own posts, whilst the average rewards have increased, the number of votes has decreased. The same changes look to have occured in my feed. I tried to carry on voting as before, running my voting power down to 20% at one point (and so my curration rewards have gone up as well), but I'm now finding myself resisting voting so much, because I find myself reluctant to vote on one-off good posts that I find, which is a pity. I'm going to try to get up to about 50% again - I was at 60% on the day of the hardfork. All this is just to say that I suspect that beneath the top-70 number not changing, there may well have been some substantial shifts in voting behaviour.
By the way, is this 17 a typo?
Thank you for typo correction.
Looking at my core feed there's the same 5-15$ payouts as it used to be a few month ago, BUT
a few month ago that was actually something like 50-100 SP, and now something like 2-5 SP.
So, despite that those who didn't cash out a few month ago are getting now some nice bonus,
in regard to percentage of the reward pool most of us are facing a big decreasing.
As for voting power, there's actually no point of trying to keep it high, here's a good explanation why
https://steemit.com/steemit/@wiser/when-it-comes-to-voting-strength-don-t-worry-be-happy
You should do a story on how top-level steemians got where they are today-- did they do it by writing good content, or trickery?
Networking plus
mediocrereasonable good content plus more networkingGood article. But since this is still a pretty small and obscure platform, most people on it today will have a fair chance of making good money here - IF they have patience. We just need to create our own communities /followers, create good content and waaaait for it. It's going to be harder and harder to get in and make money without initial investment, but I cant see any way that is unavoidable?
I love watching the numbers but I try not to give them too much weight. That being said, my favorite numbers to watch are the upvotes to comments ratio. I don't think I've ever reached a 2:1 ratio but I've been pretty close to 3 or 4:1 upvote to comment split and that gets me excited. It means there is community engagement and communication going on. That's what builds tribes. That's what will eventually boost the payouts in the future.
This post received a 1.8% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @michaelstobiersk! For more information, click here!
I thank you everyday for supporting me. One day I will fund my account and pay you forward. Much mahalo! Aloha!
You can pay me forward by resteeming good undervalued content for me to upvote it )
That's how we'll keep the wheel rotating )
That's a good deal. I'll do that. You're such a good person. I'm so lucky.