Announcement: @reward.app

This idea was originally brought up over a year ago and I didn't think about circumventing it this way at the time, afterwards the EIP came and everything changed (mostly for the better), but I believe this will be an interesting experiment now. With these new options existing, I think it will outweigh some potential negatives it may have and tackle some other issues we are facing with curation and maximization of ROI. Needless to say, once you find out what it entails in the next paragraph, this experiment is something that would exist sooner or later anyway, as the blockchain allows it.

The idea behind @reward.app is to allow authors to direct more curation rewards to voting curators from their posts through our service.

We do this by;

authors setting a percentage of the author rewards they want to go to curators on top of the usual 50%
setting us as beneficiary
we distribute them to the curators at payout

Before I dig deeper into my thought process of this idea I just want to mention one thing about Hive and how amazing it can be. Even though I put a lot of thought into and simulated how this service could evolve in my mind, it only took a small amount of time to contact an active developer on hive, explain the idea, have him code it (even though he was busy with other projects at the same time) and have it ready. No multifactor keys even required, as Hivers rely on their reputation and future income and success based on it, which in my eyes is something beautiful that can not be found on many other chains, or anywhere else on the internet.

Okay, so you might be thinking "curators are already getting more rewards since the EIP, why would we want to give them even more?"

As a an active curator there are a lot of things holding us back not just to get a better trending page, but also for promotion of posts. Not many want to burn their rewards to @null, send to the DHF and even less will decline rewards on their posts for obvious reasons. Even if they'd want to burn rewards in return for more attention and promotion of their posts, the outcome is often underwhelming because curators are disincentivized to stack votes and reward earlier voters. This is the reason many of the big accounts are voting early on posts with no other votes before them and with small percentages; to maximize returns. Even if they see posts that could deserve more rewards, they're going to avoid them because if they are the last to cast their votes on the post (and with each vote the chance of them being the last increases) they're going to lose out on rewards. This makes it really hard for more deserving posts to get trending spotlight and at the same time it encourages short or lower-effort posts, as they know their rewards are indirectly capped by how much they could earn due to the voting behavior of the big accounts.

How could @reward.app change this?

As I mentioned this is going to be an experiment but I think an exciting one. I also believe that before the EIP this experiment would've not been as successful due to the lack of downvotes, anyway here's some thoughts on how it could evolve:

Authors giving curators a higher cut from their rewards could receive more and larger votes, which in turn would get them the same amount of post rewards they would've gotten either way.
Knowing they'll get bigger votes and more trending attention they'd also be aware of the downvotes that exist now so both curators and authors would have to have that in mind that they're more susceptible to downvotes if the content isn't great - which will cost them rewards.
Many authors may be more interested in the attention than the rewards, they want to receive more eyes, followers, etc, to kickstart their Hive experience and this could be a way for them to get it knowing that burning rewards would not.
Curators would not be against stacking votes as much as they are now knowing they'll get a higher cut of the rewards, at the same time the way the extra curation rewards are split can be altered with our service, so it's not always the "front-runners" or "maximizers" earning the biggest cut. There are many parameters and options that could be made available for authors to choose which one suits best for them and their curators. A couple of such paramteres could be a linear curation cut where it won't matter who voted first or one that gives an edge to those who voted last to balance out the usual 50% curation that's at the blockchain level.

In general, most curators out there who are curating content for the content and not attempting to maximize their rewards, are losing out to those who are doing the opposite. This could bring some additional balance to the ROI and how the inflation is distributed. While there are some potential drawbacks of this, it is also a good way to encourage a healthier usage of downvoting and help push great content into the spotlight it deserves. This is an experiment and it would be great to get a discussion going around decentralized ways to affect distribution and give options to users of all kinds.

We have a lot of upcoming ideas on how we could gamify this service more, one of them being a hidden curation cut, where the author can set the extra percentage that goes to curators through our website and curators would not know what it is if any. Authors could also let curators know in the post which would encourage more manual curation and less bot and front-run voting. As you can see this will open a lot of different possibilities.

How @reward.app works

If you want to give @reward.app a try, all you have to do right now is send @reward.app a memo with the number 0 to 100 which defines the percentage of the author rewards you want to go to curators.

When you write the post you just have to set @reward.app as 100% beneficiary and you'll automatically receive the rewards in liquid form at payout minus a 1% fee.

If you don't send @reward.app a memo it will use a default value of giving 4% extra rewards to the curators and you'll receive 95% of the author rewards.

There will be a more technical post coming up soon written by the developer: @cardboard. Follow @reward.app to not miss out on that and future updates!