THE TRENDING PAGE IS CHINESE TODAY

Certainly the content is great!

I've always appreciated

@sweetsssj's positive writing and it's great to see

@craig-grant finally making bank for his dedication. Celebrity users like

@jeffberwick definitely brings value to the platform and having him on the trending page now and then definitely is a good way to showcase his support for STEEM.

@trafalgar brings great humour, something that's been lacking on the platform and definitely a good thing to have around when the price crashes!

On another note, the people who vote for this content usually don't get curation rewards, because they usually vote within the first 30 minutes. So clearly the incentive to vote is simply because people really like them, and now that rewards are linear, if it was just a whale they wouldn't be making it.

Here's my only issue

I have this feeling in my gut that says although it's changed for now, this could become the new predictable trending page . . . where those who have "made it" continue to "make it" and there's not enough space for everyone of course (there never will be). But if competition continues to rise, and it gets harder and harder to gain that recognition necessary to boost your following, there is always the option to create a new platform and onboard however many dissatisfied users. There is now greater incentive to keep STEEM as a place where anybody could make it! Not just those who already have . . .

What if curation rewards were used to incentivise seeking out NEW users that would be popular?

Apparently we have a system like this already. You only get curation rewards if you're one of the first but after the first 30 minutes (more or less). This is supposed to incentivise voting for the underdog.

Instead, curation reward % for new users with no whale/dolphin followers could be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than curation rewards for users with lots of SP behind their followers.

Lets say a new user appears on the platform and has no followers at the time of their first post. The ratio of author rewards to curation rewards could be 50-50 since this author needs to gain some recognition on the platform. The curators who bring this new user to peoples attention get a higher % of the curation reward for doing so. Lets say this new user was the real

@satoshi-nakamoto and they proved it in that first post (I know OMG #starstruck).

There's a high likelihood that after being brought to the attention of the whole community by the upvotes,

@satoshi-nakamoto would have immediately gained a huge following of users that combine to make a large stakeholder. If the combined power of all of his followers were over 100 GV then the % of curation rewards for this authors next post could be as low as 5%.

This drastically lowers the incentive to upvote this user based solely on the expectation that they will win since the % of the rewards would be lower. However, simply liking this author and his content is still incentive enough for many users to upvote the content.

Whale Games

For those of us who believe whales love to play games, there are ways to "game the system" if you will. But I don't see them to be any more problematic than the downvote. Whales can use their SP as they will, whether to unfollow people they like to upvote, or follow users that they don't want to see incentivised to upvote. There are benefits to the incentive, but there are also benefits to giving away less of your rewards to your curators. The more times a user makes it to trending, the more followers they get and less curation rewards they give away.

My hope would be this would greatly increase the incentive for whales to seek out new users seeking recognition, while those who have already "made it" continue to get support from the followers they gained.