I have been thinking a lot the last few weeks about how steemit's curation mechanism works. My main goal is to try and figure out how to help the best content get the most rewards (as I'm sure the rest of you would like).
The way I see it now (correct me if I'm wrong) the way to be successful on steemit goes something like this:
- Start following interesting people and making good comments on their posts
- Start writing good quality posts
- Post your posts in the relevant communities on steemit.chat
- Hopefully you start getting some followers at this point
- Use voting bots to try and get some attention to your posts (this is my personal least favorite)
- Repeat these steps and hopefully, maybe, someday, your post gets on the trending or hot list and you can really start making some progress.
This process isn't too bad (its pretty similar to how the real world works) but I think it could be better. Here are some problems/inefficiencies I see with this system.
Voting bots!
I don't think it is good for the system to be able to buy votes. I understand that it is almost a necessity for people to get started, but I hate that!
Posts with wasted potential
What about all those posts that you posted at the beginning that got less than 10 views. They are basically worthless now because even if someone finds it in the future, you won't get anything from it after the first few days. (Or is it a week?)
Solutions!
It's easy to complain about problems, the hard thing is to come up with solutions. Well I have a few propositions that I think might be able to help.
Longer term payouts
Now I'll admit that I don't totally understand why you only get paid for 7 days, it seems that it is either a technical issue, or it is so that the reward pool won't be full of old post. I cannot do anything if it's a technical issue but if it's just about the reward pool, I don't see why the old content can't compete with the new content. What if someone puts out a timeless article, video, song, etc. Why shouldn't they get paid if people like it next year too? I think they should get paid more if anything because it has to be great content for it to be popular for that long.
Investing in People
This is the main purpose of this post and why I saved it for last. What if there was a way to purchase a person's future earnings. For example, I buy a "share" of your future earnings say 1% and then I get 1% of all your future post payouts until you buy that share back from me. In this way, it would incentivise finding undervalued accounts so that you can invest, help them to reach their potential, and profit from your discovery!
How this could work
I haven't decided on a specific way that this could work but I think it could be fairly simple. Here are a few ideas:
The investor could simply buy a share for a certain price. Probably set by the account holder or possibly with an open market (Though I think an open market might not work unless there are a lot of people wanting to invest in different people. Otherwise the prices might be too easy to manipulate.) Then each shareholder would receive a percentage of all payouts. I think it needs to be easy for the account holder to be able to buy back shares in themselves. I'm not sure how to figure that out. Maybe they would just always have the option to buy it back at a certain price, or a percentage above market value or based on how much earnings have come in. Also I think we should consider having a cap to how much the shareholders can receive, but that might not be necessary if the account holder can buy them out at any time.
Another idea is to make it similar to how curation is done now. When you resteem a post or upvote it. You get a share of all the author's future earnings. For example. if 100 people have upvoted any of your posts so far and I have upvoted you 10 times I get 10% of the amount set aside for curation in all future posts. Of course, as more votes and resteems come in, my percentage would go down further. Again, this would incentivise people to vote posts from undervalued accounts. The problem I see with this, is that it might make people simply vote on every post by a relatively good account even if a certain post isn't as good as another just because they would get the same future reward.
You might be able to have a similar thing from just following people, where you get the average increased earnings from everyone that you follow. So if you follow a new account that makes $0.50 per post and then next month they make $1 per post (100% growth), you would get rewarded more than following an account that, in the same time period, went from $300 to $310 (3.33% growth) This would incentivize following undervalued accounts and helping them to grow.
Those are all of my ideas for now. Please share some more good ones in the comments and upvote your favorite ideas. My goal is to find a good solution for bringing undervalued posts to their real value and finding undervalued accounts and bringing them to their real value.
I am also open to trialing this idea if anyone is interested let me know. I might be willing to sell some shares of my future earnings. We'll have to figure out something that is a good deal for both of us.
Be sure to resteem this so we can get the most ideas possible (and if it helps me get more votes, well, so be it. haha)
Don't forget to upvote and follow me to help me continue to research and bring you guys quality posts. Thanks!