I liked linear rewards, it's what gives minnows their best chance while staying sybil-resistant. I just needed Avalon's inflation to be smart. Not hyper-inflationary like <HF16, but not leading to a slow death like the current real-world settings of STEEM's inflation.

I like your thinking on this and your emphasis on not repeating the mistakes of Steem. The main benefit of superlinear rewards is that early users who played by the rules had the chance to do well. If there is no difference between early users and late users then how do you attract users away from Youtube or anywhere else where popular users are favored? For example, a Youtube account with millions of followers is favored because they have millions of followers. A Youtube account like this would have no good reason to go to DTube from Youtube if there are linear rewards because Youtube probably pays much better for a user like this.

Now for the true minnows who are starting from scratch I can agree with linear rewards but only to a point. The main issue with superlinear rewards wasn't that some users were getting $1000 or $10,000 for a post as this is not unusual for popular users on Youtube if the content goes viral. The issue was that the same users were getting $1000 or $10,000 a post.

So in my opinion if you can set the rewards so there is no limit that the popular content can earn, but also set it in such a way that the trending users are randomized to a certain extent so the same users don't seem to win every game, then I think it can work.

In other words in Youtube or in any lottery you will always have some content which goes viral, which becomes famous, which can bring in thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, and more on Youtube. Youtube if it offers a greater potential to win big rewards, (bigger than DTube) then people will of course focus on Youtube because Youtube simply offers unlimited reward size as there is no cap that I'm aware of for Youtube rewards.

Steem and DTube offer much greater risks than Youtube so the rewards have to be superior. A Youtuber has to share their profit with Youtube but in general the more subscribers you get on Youtube, the more likes you get on Youtube, the more ads you get on Youtube, then you can get estimated $4.18 per 1000 ads on Youtube. $0.0042 per ad view.

DTube has to offer something more than this minimum, my guess something around $5 or so for each post and then the economics make sense. Of course you would have a difficult time achieving that as things scale up unless DTube can remain profitable but it would beat Youtube for most people if most posters can earn $5 for each post on DTube or around that, assuming the posts are of reasonably high quality.

But if it is less than this, then Youtube begins to make more sense. If someone for example posts crypto technical analysis reports on Youtube and on DTube then you would think DTube should pay this kind of content much more considering the topic but if the Youtube post gets 1000+ views suddenly Youtube might earn then more. ANd how many viewers would it even take for 1000 ad views?

500 viewers who see 2 ads during the stream. 250 viewers who see 4 ads during the stream. On top of that there is Patreon which people with lots of subscribers can leverage but for some reason Steem and DTube do not have an easy way for fans to tip or subscribe to content. So in general I think if long term subscription mechanisms are added to reward content then it will have potential to be at least as good as Youtube with Patreon.

I don't know how DTube will make a profit or how the token economics will work to allow for profit sharing. If there is no powering up then how exactly will the token gain value?

Indeed, the 7 days monetization limit has been our biggest issue for our video platform since day 8. This incentivized our users to create more frequent, but lesser quality content, as they know that they aren't going to earn anything from the 'long-haul'. Monetization had to be unlimited on DTube, so that even a 2 years old video could be dug up and generate rewards in the far future.

Infinite monetization is possible, but as removing tokens from a balance is impossible, the downvotes cannot remove money from the payout like they do on STEEM. Instead, downvotes print money in the same way upvotes do, downvotes still lower the popularity in the hot and trending and should only rewards other people who downvoted the same content earlier.

This is good and something Steem lacks. The ability to have content which doesn't get old and which can profit essentially for as long as people get value from it is exactly how to provide incentive for high quality content. But how exactly will DTube create enough profit to share this with the content creators? I still am missing that part.

References

• https://myworkfromhomemoney.com/make-money-youtube/