Yesterday was the first day of our reward pool update and I have some numbers for you.

First off, a brief explanation of the change and why we did it.

Prior to yesterday, everyone earned the same rewards regardless of where they made their post. The new change reduces the rewards to posts that use our tags but are not created on https://stemgeeks.net.

There are a few reasons for this change, the primary one is we are indexing posts that use additional tags outside of our community tag "stemgeeks" and "stem". These additional tags (science, technology, engineering, math) are added to allow us to capture more related content in the community. This doesn't work 100% of the time as people frequently improperly tag their content.

A common issue is tagging posts as "technology" when they mention Bitcoin even though it only has to do with the price. While Bitcoin is in fact a technology, talking about price and investing has nothing to do with STEM and is off-topic.

Everyone is free to tag their posts however they like, but as a community I want to see on-topic posts rewarded and off-topic posts to fade into the background. I also want to see users who are actively contributing time and effort to STEMGeeks to receive the most rewards and attention.

This is the primary reason for the change, but there are other benefits as well. If you post on https://stemgeeks.net we become the authority for the content and receive more search engine traffic as a result. This helps us potentially get more users to sign on and more readers to your content.

First day results

After around 23 hours or so, I have seen around 450 STEM deposited into the @stemburn account. This represents 50% of the author rewards for anyone using STEMGeeks tags without using our front end. This is roughly 3% of the weekly reward pool and I estimate the total weekly burn for this change will result in over 20% of the reward pool being burned weekly. This number should go down as more users opt to use https://stemgeeks.net to post their content.

This is a very significant amount of tokens being removed from the supply. STEMGeeks already is less than half the inflation of most tribes and has a very low yearly supply. Relative to other tokens, there are very few tokens to go around and authors posting on https://stemgeeks.net are earning a lot due to low competition.

Remember as always, I burn all author rewards earned on @stemgeeks and liquid curation rewards on @stemcuration further reducing the weekly supply by another 3% or so.