I've been on steemit for a while now and have been following the various debates around curation rewards and the like. I actually had a few thoughts the other day! I really did! Not that they are necessarily good ones but here goes.
1. Upvotes and comments from anonymous users
I think unregistered users should be able to upvote and comment. With no steem power their votes wouldn't contribute to rewards but it would help with engagement from non Steemians and even encourage new users to join. If you are going to go to a site you want to be able to interact with it! I realise that this could create an opportunity to attack steemit, posting mass comments for example, but surely there is a way to implement such a feature safely.
This would also reduce the barriers to entry. If someone was considering moving to steemit but they already had a community elsewhere then you would still want to be able to interact with that community at your new home even if some of them weren't Steemians themselves.
Finally I'm sure many articles on steemit are enjoyed by casual visitors. Anonymous upvotes would let the author know about that too!
2. Post Resurrection
I know that steemit needs to preference new content but old content that was not rewarded should have a way of getting a second or even third life. For example, say a post from six months ago suddenly starts getting a lot of upvotes. If a threshold is reached - I guess to keep the computation manageable - the post could be brought back into the rewards pool. I think that this would be encouraging for bloggers knowing that their hard work might still find an audience and they might be rewarded even down the track when their content is suddenly rediscovered. It would encourage better content too knowing that there was such a chance.
3. Curation
If I am a whale, does my steem power count equally at every upvote? If so then I think that a user's curation capital should be limited. For example each user could be allocated curation coins that expire if they aren't used within a given period. Something like that, so that curators have limited curation capital. Maybe these coins can be issued daily, just upvote away and the system will let you know when your curation capital has been spent. Future upvotes would no longer contribute to the rewards. The coins disappear if you don't use them, you can't save them up. Your curation rewards are then determined by how you spent those curation coins.
Having such a system in place it could then be tweaked to get the right balance. Maybe whales get slightly less curation coins as a percentage of their stake, there could be a minimum allocation, spending the coins in a distributed way (i.e. not always upvoting the same account) is preferenced, stuff like that.
Also if there were anonymous upvotes I think it would be interesting to allow them to contribute to the rewards slightly too. Something like that could be worth tinkering with, another tool in the black art of curation. I'm tending to lean towards the idea that getting curation right is key to the success of steemit. A good solution to the curation problem would be revolutionary for any site.
Anyway what do you think?
