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Preface
Steem Blockchain is one of the most versatile blockchains of today's era. Each day, a set reward pool is allocated to reward the authors and curators of steemit platform. While, many people took this as an oppurtunity to deliver quality content and get paid for it, some chose to abuse the system..
Currently, there are various discussionss going on in the platform amongst few influential influential individuals on how to stop the reward pool abuse but instead of reaching a viable solution, steemit community is now divided and have started to take sides in flagging wars. This practice is destroying the entire ecosystem of platform and does not reflect the ideology upon which the pillars of steemit and steem blockchain were formed.
How Reward Pool Abuse Works
It is no secret that most people on steemit like to follow steemians with massive wallet size. This is done in hopes of curating the post of such whales at the right time to get their attention and to get high curation rewards.
Keeping in view the above mentioned hypothesis, the general following of a whale is rather large and single post from that whale ends up paying out nearly 300-400$ on average.
The real issue however, is that few whales have started to post almost 10-12 times a day on purpose and are earning 400$ average on each of their posts
With current prices of SBD and Steem, it is estimated that each of those whales are earning more than 10,000 US Dollars per day.
Evolution of the Problem
While the above mentioned problem existed and was confined to only 2-3 whales, others took the charge to create massive amounts of posts (containing 2 paragraphs at most) targeting those 2-3 whales without offering any viable solution and in turn abused the reward pool even more in the name of "Saving the Reward Pool" since each of those posts also paid out in thousands of dollars.
Almost 40-50% of the trending page on steemit is filled with these kind of posts that is not only making steemit look bad but it is it is also destroying the tag of "Trending" . Many deserving posts could not make it to either "Trending" or even "Hot" sections because of this.
Despite the poor level of maturity that was displayed in the said posts, there were few who actually made some contribution in an attempt to reach a suitable solution. It is suffice to say that terms and conditions of proposed solutions could not be met by all stakeholders and everything went back the way it was i.e. massive abuse of reward pool.
Another Type of Reward Pool Abuse on the Rise
Setting this aside, there is another form of reward pool abuse that is on the rise. Steemit devs clearly have authorised to use voting bots whereas few whales took the responsibility of setting guidelines on how people should use voting bots.
While these efforts are worth applauding in relation to making steemit more transparent, but once again, in order to promote their agenda and self created guidelines, these whales have started to post countless times a day with each post containing a mimicking gif or a meme along with names of those who are not using voting bots as per their guidelines. These poor quality posts are earning more than 900$ per post as well, which again comes under the umbrella of abuse of reward pool.
Solution of Reward Pool Abuse
Keeping in view the above mentioned encumbrances, I hereby suggest a viable solution that will curb the reward pool abuse to some level.
All the steemians may please be restricted to be able to post only 3 times a day and Top 20 witnesses with 5 posts per day. Please note that by post, I mean blog posts and not the comments.
Steemit condenser can be edited to show everyone how many posts are remaining in their daily quota.
This step will help in reducing massive amount of posts that are being posed by whales just for fighting with each other. Also it will curb those whales who are posting 12 times a day in order to grab more shares from reward pool.
Conclusion
The ugly war of "who is right" and "how it should be done" has blown out of proportion and needs to be nipped. The only reasonreasonable solution of the problem that I can see is to reduce the number of posts per person to "actually" save the reward pool.
I rest my case...
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors