If nobody else is going to say it, I will 🎥🗣🎙

Today's video may be controversial, but I felt it essential to bring this topic up. Before we get into all of this, please know that I have the utmost respect for the 3Speak team and I will continue to support the app regardless of what the beneficiary % is. However, over the years I have learned that voicing your opinion is vital for optimum functionality. This can often mean giving/receiving some harsh criticism, but the truths must be told. Let's have a closer look at how 3Speak currently operates.

As of right now, Hive rewards are set to a 50/50 split between authors and curators. You may not know this, but that used to be a 75/25 split tilted towards the creator.

As you can see here:

I believe that the 50/50 split is a better option for Hive at large and curators surely are loving those extra rewards.

The same 50/50 split still applies when posting on 3Speak instead of something like PeakD or Hive.blog (which both take 0%). There is one major difference with 3Speak, they also carry an additional 11% cut from your half of the rewards. This means you are dropped down below 40% in total. That is a drastic dip from the former 75%.

You can see the current 3Speak beneficiary settings here:

3speak%.png

So not only do the 3Speak accounts get a cut from the curation rewards, but they are also getting a cut of the author rewards. 3Speak is not the only app to do this. You can find the same over on Vigilante.tv and other apps like D.tube. It seems pretty normal to everyone and most just accept it, but is it a trend that we really want to continue as we further explore what Web3 is going to be?

Then when you look at another Hive app Liketu, you will notice that they only take 1% beneficiary.

See here:

liketu%.png

This is much more respectable and I think this app is setting a better precedent for beneficiary rewards.

What gives❓

The question I ask today is...

What justifies this 11% beneficiary?

I'm not jumping to conclusions and thinking that it is entirely unneeded. I am definitely curious to know what exactly all of those extra rewards go to. Is it development? Advertisement? Paying employees? Or something else entirely?

It feels pretty harsh giving away 11% of our rewards for every single video that we post to 3Speak. Especially when the app's userbase isn't huge yet, it has many bugs and often goes down for a few hours, and they still don't offer a 4K upload option.

I could easily upload my videos to YouTube and then embed them in my post so that I don't lose that 11% and have the 4K option. I of course have chosen not to do that, but not everyone is making that same choice. I know of at least a few people who never post on 3Speak and some of them have specifically mentioned the overbearing beneficiary number as the underlying reason.

I think it's more important to see the number of actual users on 3Speak increase. Lowering the beneficiary to something closer to 5% could maybe be a wise decision for long-term growth and encouraging more people on Hive to switch from YouTube to 3Speak.

Who knows, maybe I'm totally wrong about all of this and every bit of that 11% goes to something that is vital for 3Speak. I would love to know the answer to this and that is why I made this video today.

I don't usually tag people, but to make sure the team sees this, I'm mentioning some of the 3Speak team members who I have interacted with in the past.

@eddiespino @starkerz @theycallmedan

What is your opinon❓

I'm dying to know what everyone else is thinking about this. I know some will agree with me, but I figure some will disagree with me and I'm willing to hear everyone out. Leave a comment and let's discuss. Please try to keep things civil and look at things from multiple perspectives without assuming any certain thing. Hopefully, we get some comments from the team to tell us exactly why this 11% is the current setting.

I will continue to use 3Speak either way, but I think it would be pretty awesome if their team at least addresses this sometime soon. I am not demanding a change, more so recommending it to see if more people start posting and interacting on the platform.

Thanks for your time today. Feel free to reblog this for further reach and be sure to follow me if you aren't already.