@lexiconical I completely agree and I posted a very similar comment in response to this amazing post on curation rewards by @miniature-tiger - An Illustrated Guide to Curation
I like your idea but I still think people will just pile on to the big authors anyway. All of this is really too complicated for most people I think and they just see big dollar amounts and know that they can get a portion of it.
I am including myself in this group since I also just thought that for max curation rewards i should vote on the most popular authors after 30 minutes.
Not sure most people, myself included, will be willing / able to do the math to figure out that their reward might be greater on a small post with 50% curation rewards as compared to a huge post with 25% - if that would even really be the case.
I agree though that the curation system as it exists today seems to have the exact opposite of the intended effect. I am very interested to see how things will work out after SMTs are released and running and different communities can change the curation settings.
"I like your idea but I still think people will just pile on to the big authors anyway. All of this is really too complicated for most people I think and they just see big dollar amounts and know that they can get a portion of it."
This is probably true for those who do not understand the system (ie probably have low stake.)
However, my hope is that some up-and-coming authors might be willing to attract more of an audience by increasing the curation split. This could even be made visible on the post or interface itself.
"Not sure most people, myself included, will be willing / able to do the math to figure out that their reward might be greater on a small post with 50% curation rewards as compared to a huge post with 25% - if that would even really be the case."
Agreed, I don't expect anyone to really do the math regularly. My hope is it just provides another reason on the stack when a user is teetering on the edge of "do I upvote this good, lower rewards post or save for curation".
At least this change would create the beginnings of a free-market response to the issue. Perhaps we'd learn that nobody wants to change the 25% split, and it would be moot, however this alone would be useful data for further changes.
I think what we are going to learn is that most authors are willing to give a bigger share of the rewards to curator which is a good thing because higher rewards for curators means more engagement and more demand for steem power.
It is essential that every users knows exactly how the curation reward system works, most users don't even know that the more SP they have the more curation rewards they get.
When users submit their vote they should be directed to a link explaining how the curation reward system works, educating users is key and I think that introducing curators/authors percentage will actually help in that regards.
I also think that authors should have the option to keep 100% of the rewards for themselves, the wider the spectrum the better. I agree entering a precise percentage is preferable because this will make every single post different and encourages curators to search for new content.
"When users submit their vote they should be directed to a link explaining how the curation reward system works, educating users is key and I think that introducing curators/authors percentage will actually help in that regards."
I am sure people will object that this will be "confusing" for some users.
Perhaps a tooltip that you get when hovering over the upvote button, that shows something like "Estimated .1 SP for curating this content", would convey that more smoothly. It could be wildly inaccurate (and say estimated on the tooltip), but simply making people aware of the concept while requiring nothing of them could be very beneficial.
"I also think that authors should have the option to keep 100% of the rewards for themselves, the wider the spectrum the better. I agree entering a precise percentage is preferable because this will make every single post different and encourages curators to search for new content."
I agree wholeheartedly. I merely didn't add those options on my image because I was fudging it in ms-paint and figured I got the idea across...
Really good point about the "free-market response". There's no better way to know how something will work out than to try it! That's also along the lines of what I was thinking about with SMTs. They will allow actually trying different curation strategies in live environments.
In the middle of writing this comment, I had a different, half-baked, idea of how to handle curation. Perhaps instead of paying out a % of the rewards from each post, there could be a separate reward fund specifically for curation. This way it would be possible, in theory, to get a larger curation reward for voting on a post than the author gets from the votes on that post.
The idea is to de-couple curation rewards and author rewards - i.e. not have them fighting for a share of the same pie.
As I said this is a half-baked idea - currently the "quality" of a post is determined by the value of the votes it gets, so this would require some other method of evaluating post quality, which may or may not be possible.
Anyway I think i'm rambling here - very glad that we're starting more discussion about this!
"As I said this is a half-baked idea - currently the "quality" of a post is determined by the value of the votes it gets, so this would require some other method of evaluating post quality, which may or may not be possible."
I love this idea, and I've considered proposing it. Of course, the key problem is subjectively assessing quality with an automated algorithm. I've posted about how to start attacking this problem so it could be possible to suggest this change, but I'm not sure exactly how to do it. Using reputation somehow is an option, and I've also suggested having a second reputation score for curation rep specifically. This might allow the decoupling (experienced curators can earn more via their higher curation rep) of which you speak.
I would like to work with a machine learning expert to train a model on the existing set of Steem posts and see how well it can "learn" to pick out high quality posts.
It would have to have no knowledge of the author of the post (so it doesn't learn just to pick popular authors) but just the content of the post and the final payout.
Then if that is used to evaluate new posts it would be interesting to see how different its evaluation of what the payout "should" be vs what it actually is. This would tell us to some degree how much who the author of a post is affects the payouts, and might allow us to find unknown authors that make high quality posts more easily.
I would bet that machine learning could do a lot with this topic.
An algorithm that actually works to make higher quality appear in trending would be great, but it's quite a task from where I'm sitting.