I feel like I work hard, spending hours conceiving, writing, and editing my little stories and making my bad artwork---for about 20 cents worth of crypto per day.

For what it's worth, me too. Minus the artwork and probably a lot of the creativity. I write more simple blogs, but I think they're good and sometimes imaginative and unique.

But what value this truly brings to anyone else and what we should expect to be paid for it.... I'm not sure. Close to $0 might be about right.

(Talking about mine, not yours.)

I've been a writer for 40 years, blogging regularly since 2003, and I was thrilled when I finally found a site that let me build up a little bit of economic value doing what I love. My DREAM is to someday be able to support myself with my writing, and here, I thought, was a venue where I might actually be able to do that!

This kind of gets at the heart of it IMO.

I believe STEEM does not really do this. This is the storyline and how it's marketed. But then the mechanics of it is it just depends on people wanting to tip you.

People buy SP >>> included in that is the right to distribute some amount of new tokens >>> they distribute it with upvotes (rather than self votes or delegating to bots etc).

It's nice to reward people for work you appreciate, and I certainly do lots of it (in between self votes and delegating). But I feel like it takes some of the magic out of STEEM, when you remember that it's just investors donating rewards.

Which we already could do by sending people PayPal or subscribing to Patreon or whatever.

To me the most special thing about STEEM is the censorship resistance.

but with rewards cut in half, that exact slog goes from seven months to 14 months (or more, considering some low payout posts will now become NO payout posts) with the same exact content and effort applied.

In theory you should still maybe expect 20 cents worth of crypto imo. Because the changes should cause more people to hold or control their own SP and to vote more loosely.

In practice it'll probably affect different people differently, and it's just kind of luck of the draw in that regard.

As a thought experiment suppose it was changed to 99/1 (99 curators, 1 creators). Now what happens is people with large or medium stakes are way more likely to control their own stakes (rather than delegate, or sell their votes).

Less unwritten "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" deals etc.

And while you only get 1% of it, there are a lot more votes from more people flying around.

Where exactly is the sweet spot that would be best for creators, I'm not sure. But I don't think it's safe to assume that lowering it from the current point is necessarily the wrong direction.

I don't FEEL entitled

Entitled... (I admit it. I was offended by that word. Hopefully, I have expressed why I disagree with that sentiment in a way that doesn't offend in return.)

I think you explained it well. I think your case isn't one of entitlement. You're passionate about your work and are taking this to mean the reward is getting slashed in half.

Maybe I didn't even choose the right word. I think for most people it has to do with having only a fuzzy understanding of the mechanics of STEEM, and not thinking much about where the rewards come from and what incentives and tradeoffs people have when they hold SP. It's like "oh, I get rewarded for this.. cool". Which does seem like a form of entitlement to me.

But not the SJW college kid form of it 😛😆 or other ways it's typically used.

I could be convinced that maybe it was the wrong word.

Mostly my belief is something like: I think STEEM is cool. I just think it's easy to imagine it can do things that it isn't designed to do.

Thanks for laying out where you're coming from.

I'm subscribing to you and will help chip in a few cents to your cause here and there 😉