Could @commentrewarder and @reward.app improve curation?

To fully understand where I'm getting with this, I'd need to first make clear how one would use these properly - warning, both incentives would come from the author rewards which means authors would have to forfeit part of their rewards in order to incentivize and potentially improve manual curation on Hive.

There's 2 ways to go about improving the dreaded increase of auto votes/trail votes, etc, that every so often disregards the content and effort placed behind certain content by the authors that receive them. I myself am one of those authors too but every so often I try to make up for this by forfeiting some author rewards using the beneficiary system, not everyone does nor cares to do this, however.

1 of them would be to give more rewards to manual voters. On the blockchain level this change cannot happen because we can't tell manual vs auto voters apart. Sure right now it's easy to spot auto and trail votes but if they found out that manual votes are getting a higher return they'd become "smarter" to act like manual votes, i.e. not always landing right after everyone else and not always at a certain post age, etc.

The other way is to downvote posts you believe have a lot of autovoters/trail votes and at the same time you think the author is being overrewarded. This causes drama and a bad UX as they feel as though you're taking rewards from them.

Okay, so let's instead look at these other two projects and how they could potentially help without using any of the two methods above.

Reward.app - the main idea behind this project was not to just liquidate your author rewards even though that's 99.99% of how people have used it over the years. I.e. they want the HBD and Hive in liquid form rather than getting HBD and Hive Power that takes 13 weeks to unstake. As you can imagine this also causes some abuse, especially since the dev behind it has insisted over the years to upvote whoever uses it (not something I've been in favor, but since I haven't submitted any liquidity to it and my main usecase for it never got used I didn't have much say in how it's being ran).

The other idea, however, is that you can set how much of the author rewards you have going to reward.app would go back to the curators. I.e. you're forfeiting part of your author rewards to give additional rewards to the curators.

The way things are set up right now at the blockchain level, authors receive 50% of the vote value while curators receive the other 50%. Since @reward.app receives up to 100% of the author rewards, however, it can at the point of payout decide what it does with these author rewards, so if the author has set up their account to give 20% extra to curators, then anyone voting on that specific post is going to get 50% + 10% rewards compared to the regular 50%. Meaning they'll get an additional 20% of the 50% going to author rewards based on the strength of their vote, etc.

The idea behind this was to function a bit similar to "bid bots" but with the option to now easier downvote if this is done excessively or in an abusive way now that we have 25% downvote mana along our upvote mana.

Let's get right into the other project now which could work well in combination with reward.app to make manual curation more rewarding and hopefully shift more voting power towards that in the long run.

@commentrewarder works a bit similar to reward.app's idea of giving curators extra rewards, but here you would also have to place a comment under the post and the author would have to upvote it in turn of getting a piece of the shares that the author is sending to @commentrewarder through beneficiaries.

To give you an idea, let's use an example.

In this post I will set 10% to go to @reward.app and send @reward.app a memo saying 100, this 100% represents how much of that 10% I want to go back to curators from the author rewards of this post. At the same time I'll also send 10% beneficiaries to @commentrewarder which means that based on which comments I vote and for how much of my voting strength, it'll send an additional 10% of my author rewards to those commenters at payout.

This means that of the 50% of author rewards this post should receive, 20% or a total of 10% will go to voters and commenters or both. I.e. if someone comments and has also voted and I decide to vote their comment, they'll receive up to 20% of their vote value if not more from commentrewarder.

Okay, let's make this example a bit easier.

If these same beneficiaries are placed (10% reward.app (with 100% going to voters) + 10% commentrewarder) and the post ends up at a displayed value of $20, with $10 going to curators and $10 going to the author (me), and there's only 1 voter on my post (let's say @theycallmedan for instance) and he leaves a comment on the post of which I upvote and no other comment.

Then theycallmedan will receive $12 curation rewards while I receive $8 author rewards.

Alright so, while commentrewarder has a lot of other amazing usecases to make life for smaller users easier and try to encourage engagement on their posts and reward.app has a bit of a controversial usecase where we could potentially use it to encourage voters on our posts in exchange for getting more votes to promote a post on trending - I think that a mix and moderate use of them both could encourage manual votes to receive additional rewards which in turn could mean better curation overall.

Anyway, I'd be up for more discussions surrounding this as I find it quite interesting how things could evolve if this was used wider.

but thanks for reading for now, I'll try make a video about it some time soon too if it's easier to understand that way.

Image is AI generated.