There's been a lot of discussions lately about rewards and payments, without getting too specific on who and which I just want to address some thoughts I have on it from my perspective. Warning though that this is kind of a free-write so I may be moving the conversation all over the place and at the end there may not even be a great point about it as I don't even know the endgame as I'm writing this right now but maybe we'll find some clarity or at least something that might help us broaden our horizons.
I wrote a post a week or so ago addressing the spike in the price of Hive and comparing it to when something similar but crazier happened back in 2017 when both SBD and Steem spiked which resulted in crazy payouts for post rewards. The main difference today is that we have free downvotes and the curve isn't as linear but the latter doesn't matter as much. The free downvotes are great and when used well even more so but along with the price of Hive going up a lot we have to adjust with it and not let the $ amounts alone affect our downvoting decisions.
What I mean by this is that we can't look at an author who's for instance been consistent, someone who's shown that they're here for the community and don't just post, weasle their way into autovotes and generally only care about the rewards without giving anything back to the community with activity, visibility from the outside or raising engagement in the comment section which I think we can all agree is something we want for our platform. Of course there are also others who do a lot behind the scenese, many of which we may not be aware of ourselves because how could we, there's so many users here it is hard to know what exactly they do - and although post rewards/the reward pool shouldn't be based on what you do for the platform "behind the scenes" now that we have the DAO it is of course a much easier option for stakeholders to choose than going through proposal voting. This is something I hope will change over time to reward a lot of other diverse activity that is a net positive for our currency and platform but until then we can't just judge a users rewards only by their content and $ amount during/after a pump. I realize I may be biased here because I belong to one of those users but I was thinking of someone else that's been discussed recently when I initially wrote that, either way, let me point out some more things about this.
There's still many who bring up the changes that occurred with the EIP which adjusted curation and author rewards from 25/75 to 50/50. Although many at the time said that this will drive authors away and content would degrade it's safe to assume that the other changes of the EIP, mainly downvotes that disincentivized buying votes just for the ROI raised curation so much more that authors realized that writing greater content meant higher rewards without them having to buy votes. Many keep bringing this up though as they see downvotes on author rewards and big stakeholders only focusing on maximizing their curation rewards as this change mainly having stolen a big share of the rewards pool to go towards investors/big stakeholders and now with downvotes they're "taking even more" from them. There's of course also the 10% that goes to the DAO but I think this post is already complicated enough so let's not go into that for now. My point is that this is something that investors may easily forget and of course it's not something that we should use as an excuse but it's also necessary to point out when the reason to certain downvotes is "over-rewarded".
This is something I don't really agree with a lot of the time. I may be biased here again because one of my biggest focuses in the past 4 years has been to assist distribution to make our currency one of the best distributed ones out there and one big reason for that is that when the next bull run hits and our coin goes up another 10-100x having as many "dolphins and orcas" will only do well for our platform. It will do well because we won't just be relying on curation projects and other big stakeholders to welcome newcomers and spread distribution even further and at the same time if there's a next bear run approaching there will be more stakeholders there to trade their way into more or less stake of our currency - although the former preferred of course as long as it's a healthy evened out distribution. Okay I really have to stop myself from getting even more sidetracked now as I almost went into the rabbit hole of smaller stakeholders not realizing what they are holding and carelessly dumping it at any price and just feeding whales on exchanges which doesn't help distribution and degrades the work of curators but yes let's go back to what I initially wanted to discuss. To conclude this paragraph though, remember that curators are also getting a lot of rewards in $ when the price spikes and unfortunately there's a lot less "unselfish" curators out there that don't focus on maximizing rewards than there are those who just curate cause they like the content even after 5 minutes.
Okay so about over-rewarded, asking for too much pay from the DAO, etc. I see this excuse of "well it might be an average pay in country X but in country X it is sooo much". I don't agree with this at all. Look at it this way from a curators perspective. When I see quality content I don't go so far as to check where the content creator is from and base my upvote strength depending on if he/she is from a 3rd world country or Liechtenstein (just a country I know has a high GDP). That's not cool in my opinion, this technology is here to remove borders, fees and middlemen and adjust the effort and rewards people get for it all over the world. This is what's wrong with the world in general, my girlfriend mentioned the other day that a Spotify subscription in her country is way cheaper than one from my country which is kind of absurd if you think about it. Now I am not against content getting rewarded a bit less, especially those who constantly make a lot of rewards but that should be adjusted more considering the stake they are getting and not the $ rewards based on prices right now. If you feel someone is earning too much % stake considering the weekly reward pool then yes downvote it a bit to adjust it for the rest of content creators but this is something you should have decided unrelated to current price and it's a bit unfair to do so now just cause the author is now earning a lot of SBD as well - that's not his fault that's how the system works. Yes there are many autovotes and lazy curators and I have no problem adjusting that with downvotes but just don't let the current rewards affect your judgement. I see this excuse of "omg he's earning $100 per post!!" and throwing downvotes cause of that is a bit lame in my opinion, especially if it's authors who've been here through thick and thin. It's unfair to target them now when they are finally getting to enjoy a price rise, it would be less unfair in my opinion to adjust post rewards a little bit of those who haven't been around at all in the past and only came back now because of the price increase.
This is of course pretty subjective everything and everyone is obviously free to downvote and upvote how they want but we should also counter downvotes we think are excessive/personal/bad intentions however we see fit. In the end it's mainly about the perspective/experiences of each voter, we can't know everyone's story, activity and efforts they put in on and off the platform to judge their rewards/stake they are earning but letting the $ amount affect our decisions is wrong in my opinion.
Okay so like I said this post was a bit open ended and could've ended in many different ways and I'm not even sure if it brought any real value to the reader but with the recent price actions it's something to keep in mind when you decide on downvoting authors based on the $ value of posts. Same thing also goes for those who complain about downvotes, though, it shouldn't be something that "chases you off" the platform cause if we're going to be real honest most of the time your contributions aren't something that would've made you the same amount of rewards on any other platform even without the downvotes. To end this I also want to point out to be careful with downvotes, one thing I really disagree with them is when they're used to zero out posts completely. Please use them to discourage autovoting/front-running and self-voting of authors by lowering the rewards, the autovoters/self-voters will over time realize that if they just curate other "better" content they'll earn more than by just self-voting less quality content - although many would just do it for the attention or offsite deals for promotion, etc, but zeroing out posts should be discouraged.
