I have noticed recently on Steem that afew of the people I follow have completly stopped posting - I often go through and 'cull' the list of people that I follow. What I noticed however is that the majority of them havent dissapeared completly and are still upvoting and curating content. There has been some discussion about this recently, as Steem has the potential to attract not only content creators, but people who are simply interested in enjoying content and earning a few curation rewards.

Steem takes time!

I think (let me know if you disagree!) that some of these people have moved towards being a curator simply because they enjoy reading content but that creating content takes alot of time (and often leads to smaller rewards than we hope). I know that being on holidays I have had a lot less time for creating content, but I still enjoy checking in every day and upvoting content I enjoy - and this doesnt take a lot of time.

It feels as though more of the focus of Steem is on the content creation side of things - but without manual curators the platform wouldnt survive. Creating content is not for everyone - it seems that Steemit is overloaded with content creators, and alot of them arent that great. All this does is flood the feeds with loads of subpar content and make it harder for good content to be recongised and rewarded!

Is it time to change the curation algorithm?

When starting a new Steem account you start with 15SP (delegated from Steem), and you earn little to no curation rewards. I noticed that when my SP hit about 100 I started to earn small curation rewards. So currently there is no real incentive for new accounts to curate content - and this leads to pretty much everyone who joins deciding they need to be a content curator.

Some suggestions

One suggestion could be to change the payout structure to allow a higher percentage of the rewards to the curators, andf thus attracting more manual curators. I can't see this happening though, as content creators feel they deserve the bulk of the reward pool - which I tend to agree with, as creating content does take alot of time.

Another option, which has been suggested before, is to move towards a 'account based platform' - all votes are created equal, and thus more competition and healthy curation. Awhile back I wrote about another blockchain based platform UUNIO, which was attempting to create this type of system - read about it here. Steem is a long way from making this change, but I feel it would defiently make things alot more fair, as at the moment at times it feels like its not what you know but who you know that counts.

There are accounts out there such as @curie which offer payments to Steemians who seek out and curate exceptional content - this not only helps under rated content creators get recognition, but also offers curators a way to earn extra rewards without investing their own money.

Although alot of people are not in a financial situation to invest their own FIAT into Steem and become a curator it is a possibility for some people. I have thought about purchasing some delegated SP myself, as a way to increase my curation rewards - has anyone else done this? What were your result - is it something you would reccomend?

Conclusion

It seems that Steem needs to find a balance between attracting content creators and curators. It seems there is an emphasis on content creation, and Steem has become flooded with poor quality content. Not everyone on here has to create content to make money.

As always I would love to hear your thoughts on this!