I wrote this prior to the curation rewards overhaul, but I think it may still have some useful points and/or starting points for discussion.
The past few weeks I have been reading and curating posts and I must say, it is quite addicting. It is really easy to get lost learning about new people, places or ideas. That being said, I do have one request. I really think we should have an advanced option for curating and voting. I understand the reasons for keeping voting simple, but I think we are missing out by not having an option for more flexible voting.
When reading and curating posts, I, like most people I assume, have some formula or algorithm to decide whether a post is voteworthy.
- What is its value to me?
- What is its value to the system? (Interesting to future members or new demographics)
- Is it a new user? Is there some benefit to rewarding them for being an early adoptor?
For each post, I try to answer all of these questions before deciding whether or not to vote for a post. In essence, there could be a number of combinations, each potentially yielding a different overall value for the post. At some threshold this overall value warrants an up vote, and this yes or no answer is what the network receives. By only allowing for this yes/no response, we are losing resolution and are no longer able discriminate between upvoted posts of varying quality. Was this their favorite post, or just one they wanted to support?
I have noticed talk recently about a concern for a lack of comments following posts. I believe that currently, the economics favor posting over commenting as a result of curators having to threshold their opinion to a yes or no answer.
In my own experience voting, I have found myself in the situation where I will appreciate a comment but hesitate to vote for it because it is not on the same level as a regular post. In reality most comments are not going to be on the same scale as a regular post and thus should not be evaluated or rewarded on the same scale. I think this conflict may be leading to a lack of support for replies and link posting on steem. If I was able to easily vote with 10% or 5% of my stake I would upvote many links and replies as many of them have some value for me.
Luckily for us, the steem blockchain already allows for variable voting weights and this can be accessed in the command line interface. However this is not a valid option for non technical users and is probably a pain even for the technical ones. What I would really love to see is an advanced voting option, ideally as a checkbox inline with the current voting buttons, which would expose an input textbox where the user can input any weight from -100 to 100, just as they would in the cli. By using the checkbox, it can be hidden for new users to retain simplicity, but would be accessible for the power users and future professional curators.
Advanced/flexible voting (user input weighting) would allow users to vote for interesting but less significant posts(links, replies, memes, etc) without de-emphasizing original content articles. By adding it as an opt-in (checkbox) feature it should not significantly increase the cognitive load for casual users.
