A long time ago I was thinking about this but it seems that it is becoming increasingly relevant. As a content provider at Steemit, getting upvoted with some significant payout is necessary to be able to continually provide decent quality articles well into the future. As much as I enjoy the writing, it takes an enormous amount of time and energy to continually create and put it together whist still maintaining all other aspects of life to survive.
However, this is only half of the story as without curation, there is no payout which means I personally am unable to continue as a provider. The curators are vital here and I see them as my customers and patrons and I do my best to provide both valuable content for them and content that adds value to the platform itself.
Before my time at Steemit, the curation/content split was 50/50 and as someone that really does put a lot of effort in and wasn't here at this time, this seems unfair. But, that is not necessarily the case at all. The reason is that many of those with high SP have earned it through various ways and should be entitled to benefit from it. Their inability to do so adequately from their perspective has spawned a whole range of behaviour that I think is harmful for the community in the long-term.
The largest of which concerning curation in my opinion, is vote selling. This happens because a curator can make much more selling their vote than spending their time curating content. This can be as much as three times, the value of manual curation without having to do anything.
This in turn spawns another anti-Steemit behaviour which is indiscriminate upvoting of content as it is the purchaser who buys, not the curator, who chooses where the vote goes. This means a great deal of the content that is upvoted is on poor quality that no one with any investment here would naturally vote upon. This takes from the pool which means that the content that is deserving, has less value added plus, many of the larger accounts that may vote upon it, don't as they are selling their vote instead.
Delegation of SP is also very popular now and this has a similar problem as to get the delegation cost back, a buyer will either need to be a very good curator or, self-vote content and comments. Most are not good enough curators to do so and those willing to self-vote comments for no reason likely do not have very high content production standards.
What I would like to try is if we can change the behaviour of users (providers and curators) to both improve the quality of content getting voted upon and provide returns significant enough that a curator feels they need not sell their vote or the gains from it are much less significant.
So, here is my idea: A curation value slider.
There is already the VP slider which allows for weighting of value but a curation percentage slider could allow curators to choose how much curation value they will take with the old 50% being the maximum.
For example, a curator with a $10 upvote could take 50 percent curation meaning they will get the same payout as the author, 5/5.
But that same curator might also really like the content and choose instead to give the author the majority of the curation award too. Let's say the curator chooses 10% curation return which means the direct split is 1/9 in favour of the author.
What I wonder is if this will disrupt the current system of vote selling as it now means that a curator can compromise a little bit of profit but can get significantly more return than currently while actually helping the real providers and therefore, the platform grow and Steem price rise. Win/Win/Win.
This also may mean that a well-invested and intentioned curator could spread a little wider as they are taking increased rewards through curation. They would be able to give added support to their favourite authors and still be able to provide some support for others.
With the reduction in value available for low-quality and the increase in value for high quality, there would likely be a shift of some percentage of users to work a little harder and create a better level of service for their customer, the curator.
For the curation guilds, this also allows them more options to increase their SP and therefore their ability to reach a wider group of service providers. I know for some currently, they are struggling to get support even though they are doing all they can to drive higher quality content upwards.
On top of this, would this mean that those people buying delegation would also change their behaviour to include more healthy curation rather than just self-voting? I don't know about this but it would at least add more incentive to do so and if some of these choose to grow the platform rather than rape the pool only, it is better.
Now, when it comes to getting the slider itself, I think that it would be a similar process to that of getting the power slider except one would have to earn a certain amount of SP through curation to qualify. This will at the very least slow down the legions of tiny curation botnets from taking even more and, it would ensure that by the time the slider arrives, the curator has a good understanding of the system.
The average curation rewards currently is around 29 SP but with the massive amount of tiny bots, I would suggest one would have to earn something like 40 SP (this is an arbitrary figure at the moment). This means that if one is predominantly posting, it would take quite some time to get the slider but, for a significant investor, they could get it within a week of starting to vote.
If implemented, the benefit of this type of slider is that it puts control of quality back into the hands of curators rather than tying them to vote selling for profits. This should also be significantly better for real authors too as the reward pool is larger as less crap is upvoted AND curators have returned to the system to vote once again.
The added benefit is that this slider is variable and changeable. If at some point 50/50 is not working, the numbers can be nudged either way to better suit the environment.
It almost pains me to say that curators deserve more of a reward on the content that they did not produce but, it also doesn't benefit me at all if they are not voting, as either they are selling their vote or selling all to delegation.
This platform is still in its infancy and has a lot of potential within but that is increasingly being lost as the system becomes a pay to play environment rather than the platform it was designed to be, which was one where all have a chance if they put their investment in.
As a content provider such as myself, my investment is a lot of blood, sweat and tears, as curators, their investment is their willingness to use their SP to support content if they think it has value. If content provider and curator work together, it creates an ecology that supports a continual spiralling of value for those looking to grow while suffocating those looking to do harm.
I am in no position to comment on all aspects of this or how best to implement it but, perhaps with adequate thought and development, it is worth running as an experiment to see if and how it changes user behaviour. At least, we could learn something new.
Yes/no/maybe/GTFO
I rarely ask, but if you do think this is a possibility in some way, it would be great to be able to get it to the dev team's eyes to see if there is something workable within. Thank you.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]