As it is right now, the design of Steemit doesn’t allow posts older than 30 days to receive rewards.
The Problem
This limitation creates the following problems:
low affinity for existing users: it gives only a limited time window to interact with the content, by artificially creating the impression that the content which cannot be voted on is outdated or not relevant (or frustrating people that want to vote on those posts and can't)
limiting interaction for new users: although new users may arrive at the platform via search engines and they find something they like, they can’t see the possibility to vote, and many may even not know they have this possibility, hence, they don’t see the benefits of the platform
limited revenue for writers: long tail is a relevant source of income and it’s now completely ignored
The Proposed Solution
In order to solve this problem, I propose the following enhancement: a “hosting fee” at the post level.
It means that posts that are allowed to receive votes over the 30 days have to pay a hosting fee. Those posts should have the UI updated accordingly (there will be buttons for upvote, etc) and the authors should be credited as well.
The hosting fee should be split: 50% will be burned (sent to null), 50% redistributed to the rewards pool (which means it will increase the curation rewards pool as well). The hosting fee per post should be significant, but not exaggerated (in any direction, not too high, to discourage people to pay, nor too low, making it insignificant).
Hosting fee can be activated / deactivated globally (for all posts) or individually, for each post.
Example: Right now there are roughly 1000 posts written each day. Out of them, only 100 may be subject to this strategy (the rest are memes, announcements or other stuff that may not be relevant 3 years from now). If the hosting fee for those 100 posts will be 0.01 Steem / day, during one year the total spent for them will be 0.01 x 365 x 100 = 365. Multiplying it by 365 days (assuming each day the authors will produce, on average, 100 posts worth of hosting), that gives 133,225. Out of which 50% is burned 66.612.5) and the rest is allocated to the reward pool.
For an author, the cost per post, per year, will be 3.65. The potential reward can be between 2x up to 10x (based on my experience with long tail).
Benefits
- increased affinity for the platform - more people will be exposed to voting and that will increase engagement
- increasing potential reward - long tail posts will tend to perform better
- inflation limiting factor - half of this hosting fee will be burned which will take out from the market a significant amount of STEEM (think of this burning process like paying now for promotion, the STEEM you pay right now goes to null, and you get exposure, with the “hosting fee” you send STEEM to null in order to access the voting feature).
Please leave a comment stating your opinion on that. If you agree with this proposal, please resteem it so we can reach a critical mass.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
