I looked out upon the Steemit garden today and I saw an explosion of conversation, suddenly posts that had laid dormant for weeks, had comments on them; and it was good.
Then my gaze was cast upwards upon the new posts, flowing forth from the wearied hands, of the scribes. I readied myself for the outpourings of joy from Steemites everywhere, but instead all I heard was a rumble of discontent; its volume grew, threatening to turn into a roar.
They've taken away our voting rewards!
More Than A Vote
OK, that was a bit dramatic I know, but after reading another post talking about how the voting rewards had been removed. I had to check I hadn't been dreaming and reread the 
After rereading, I still think they're fantastic, why isn't everyone head over heels? You all should be, we all should be.
But I keep reading that the voting rewards have gone, but they haven't, there is just a smaller pool for voters, so as to reward commentators, the people who add great value to a post, who have so far have gone unrecognized for their efforts.
On top of that, there is no more early bird bonus for voting on a post before anyone else, and that's good because it stops placing such a heavy emphasis on voting. This is good, because only rewarding voting, when wanting to reward curation was flawed from the start; but that has changed, the new way is the best way.
Wikipedia states that:
Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets.
[It] establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use
So if we look at the above definition, then we can indeed reconcile voting with curation, because selection is part of the process and voting can be thought of as a type of selection.
However look at how small a part that is, what about the part where it talks of; maintaining and adding value, for present and future use?
How is a vote doing that?
Answer: It isn't.
Let Us Now Tend To The Garden Of Steemden
As we've seen, voting takes care of the selection part, as a digital curator, you select content by up-voting it, which will go towards keeping it on the Steemit feed. Or indeed deselect it by down-voting, therefore hiding the post from view.
But think about the Steem rewards algorithm for a second. It is set up so that a single vote on its own will not be rewarded as much, as when that vote is in a group. This means that the algorithm was written with the fact in mind; that a single vote on its own is not that important, the group is what matters.
Holding this fact in our heads, we go onto the part where a digital curator on Steemit, is supposed to maintain and add value to the articles they curate.
How do you do this?
Simple, you maintain and add value to a post by commenting and sharing; the sharing part we'll come back to later, but for now, concentrate on the value of contributing your thoughts to an article via the comments section.
I made a post the other day called; Steemit Will Not Be The New Facebook, it has made around a third as much as my two most popular articles. Despite this, it has given me so much joy, because it has 21 comments to date and the comments enrich my article, they add value to it by adding the commentators' opinions.
Not only do comments and replies add value, but when you pour your heart and soul into an article and you don't get any comments, it is a little disappointing. Especially if you had hoped to spark some kind of debate and to garner people's opinions. Sure the money is great and I can't deny, seeing an article get into four figures isn't pleasing. But it's the fact that as an internet writer, connecting with your audience is a huge part of the whole deal.
Of course the issue here is how fair are the new proposed changes? Well comments help maintain a post in a couple of ways. Firstly, the act of leaving comments on a post, bumps it up the Steem feed, making it more visible. Secondly, an article with plenty of comments will help future Steemit users find it through the responses option; then, read those responses, reply to them and carry it all on again.
If you've ever used any kind of blogging or forum before Steem; then you'll know that posts with replies, often get sub-replies a long time after the original posting, in some case years; what is that, if not, maintaining and adding value, for present and future use?
Before you say it, I know there is also a votes option in the drop-down menu, however you can have a post with a low votes to comments ratio. Both votes and comments can imply value, it is comments that imply a kind of functional value. Anyone can mindlessly click on the vote button without even reading the article, but it takes thought and attention to add a comment, especially one that adds to the post's general discourse.
Sharing Is Caring
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about the value of adding links in the reply section and sharing on social media in my article; A Solution To Curator Awards. I now realise that perhaps those things will be too hard to protect against abuse; maybe one day sharing to verified personal blogs and sites can also be rewarded. Even then it may not be possible to differentiate between someone who shares to 100 followers and someone who puts it out there to a million people.
The main points to take away from this overhaul; are that the rewards are more balanced now. OK some people are annoyed that their voting curation awards will now be smaller.
Some people like me, who started off being a good commentator and then slowly slipped into the inevitable pattern of voting without reading; will be much happier.
I don't want to be in a voting arms race, working out better strategies to out vote my fellow Steemites. We're all in this together and enough healthy competition already exists, in the form of content creation. That is a competition I want to be in, because it can only breed positive things, like I said to 
I don't only want to vote on 
To clarify:
It is fine to have competition between the content producers, because that will drive up the quality and popularity (not always mutually exclusive, I know) of the articles on Steemit. It is not fine to have competition between the curators, as that just leads to them trying to obtain the best curation strategy, instead of engaging.
But of course with financial incentive present, you could argue there will always be competition, so in that case adjust the rules so that the output from the curators' competition, is high level engagement. Just as the output from the creators' competition is high level content.
Would you rather have someone visit Steemit for an hour a day, doing nothing but voting? Or would you rather that same person, voted and also engaged with authors?
The End Of The Robot Cold Wars
As in the real world, more so in fact, a cyberspace voting war can, will and has been automated and try as you might as a mere human voter, you can't beat the bots. Even though recently I have befriended them, growing my fan club of 3 to 5, I can see that all they do is perpetuate the arms race. On top of which, I can't have a decent, or in fact any conversation with them.
Higher voting rewards for getting in early, will encourage more bots, which in turn will encourage more people to vote on anything those bots vote on; which drives up the popularity of the articles the bots are voting on. Which again encourages the production of more bots and we go round and round in a cold-war type scenario and just like the US and the Soviet Union in the late 80s, we will end up with a complete imbalance of superpower nations and the rest.
Only this time it won't be a massive nuclear arsenal, spread strategically around the globe, that denotes who the superpowers are. It will be huge botswarms, with their equally large group of human followers, voting on a tiny group of individuals who they perceive to make the most money, all at the cost of the actual content.
We don't need this; it's an unwinnable war and it's just not Steem. In the middle of writing this article, I have just read Dan Larimer's Introduction, and I'm 100% positive, he wouldn't want the above scenario playing out.
Final Analysis
So in a nutshell, the new proposals will mean that the result of the competition between curators, is more engagement at a higher quality. The competition between creators to produce better, higher quality, original content, remains unchanged.
Voila!
I think it's appropriate to end with what I feel are the most important parts of the changes, they are just a proposal now, but this is one Steemite, who believes they are a change for the better.
Overhaul Of Curation Awards excerpt:
Vote or Post Every Day
"Users who login and do something every day remain engaged. This
engagement will naturally lead them to discover new content they will
want to vote on. We don’t care what they vote on, so long as they show
up every day.This can obviously be automated by bots, but it has the important
quality that bots have no advantage over regular people. The network
already rewards “bots” who produce blocks and mine so giving them a
small extra bit for voting daily doesn’t really change much. It is
more important who isn’t getting the rewards: those who do nothing.
60% to author of post 25% to comments (at all levels) on original
People will have financial incentive to be first to reply to
potentially popular content with a comment that itself will likely
receive many votes. This process makes the people voting a turing test
for curation and minimized the potential profits of voting bots.Overall we feel that these changes should maximize the community
participation."
I look forward to future engagements, in the Garden Of Steemden.
Till next time,