I was interested to see that one of the features I am most looking forward to (curation guilds) is actually an unpopular feature for a lot of people. I also noticed that during last night's Steem Speak, Ned mentioned an implementation detail that has me a little concerned. I wanted to throw a few thoughts out there and try and start a discussion.
Why Curation Guilds Are Needed
Currently the main choices for whales to vote are: curate manually, use a voting bot, abstain from voting altogether, or give their private posting key to someone / some group (like Curie) / or a third-party website (like Streemian) to vote on their behalf.
Many whales are not good manual curators.
Many investors are not going to want to curate, but they will lose money if they don't.
Without advanced AI, bots are generally doing a bad job curating. It will also be expensive/costly to design bots to properly curate based on an advanced defined set of parameters.
Using bots to vote are also difficult for a "plain investor" to setup.
Many users are not going to want to share their private posting key with other users or third party websites for security reasons.
Dedicated manual curators are arguably the best people to be reviewing content and deciding which content deserves the most upvotes.
What Curation Guilds Should Do
Allow users to delegate their voting power to groups of curators (guilds) who will do a better job curating than they will.
Allow groups of curators to form, that review posts and comments and hunt down good content that meet their criteria.
Provide another way for Steemians to group together and form communities.
Distribute the voting pool across a larger variety of content.
Add transparency to a lot of the voting that takes place.
Allow users to define what the stand for as far as what should be voted on.
Recommended Features
The ability to chose a name and avatar for the guild
The ability to define the rules for the guild
The ability to join and leave a guild
The ability to decide how much of your voting power to delegate to a guild
The ability to delegate your voting power to multiple guilds
The ability to designate positions (admin, voting power delegate, voter)
Some type of ranking system within the guild
The ability to audit the voting behavior of the guild, and the individual members voting on its behalf
Different ways to compare and rank guilds
The ability to define how much of the curation reward the guild will receive vs. how much the owner will receive
Users in a guild should still be able to cast their own votes when they want to
Unanswered Questions
How will a curation guild actually cast votes?
Will there be designated users who are able to cast the votes?
How will the interface distinguish between those users doing just 'regular' voting, and voting on behalf of the guild?
How will the block-chain decide the order of who voted from a curation perspective, when all the votes from the guild are cast at the same time?
How will the curation rewards be delegated across the members of a guild?
