STEEM could use Economic shifts to reinvigorate the content discovery and opportunity. It could also use SMTs for this. Considering how much Rewards need a CounterPart UI that respects the intended outcome such as Content Discovery, UIs could make changes to adapt to what Kevin is asking for. Additionally, SMTs has always partly been an opportunity to engage in experimentation prior to Economic Shifts in STEEM. That said, I like Kevin’s proposal, probabaly all three pieces, and it’s noted that shifting curation rewards and lowering the cost of downvotes would be fairly simple code changes to implement. It’s also noteworthy that Super Linear Rewards beneath n-squared is not so costless from a coding standpoint.

My response to Kevin’s pitch to him and others in a chat has been to remind folks what new user experience had often been under Super Linear Reward conditions:

New user A sees veteran user B’s low quality content. User B low quality content is getting big pay day. User A makes post that is 100x better (even by measurable SEO Standards) and yet get paid ¡zero!

The result of this outcome was often that Super Linear Rewards are inexplicable to new users causing difficulty meeting user expectations (particularly around “get paid to post”) and reveal a system that is not about how good the content is, but rather about How Big is Your Network or How Much Are You Networked Here. That super linear rewards become about Networking instead of Content, and disturb new users by making the system incomprehensible, makes it difficult for me to want to go back to. That said — if the entire community wanted it — I am listening. I found Kevin and Traf’s arguments strong all the way through. Personally, I could spend a blogpost speaking to the merits of Linear Rewards.

So my suggestions: 1. There is a need for STEEM Economic Shifts. 2. There are many other Economic Shift Possibilites, such as 100% Curation Rewards and 0 Creator Rewards. 3. SMTs would allow us to play with some of these experiments. 4. There is tons of demand for SMTs from many of our current 500+ apps for both fundraisings and user incentives. 5. Vote Buying Can Be Considered a UI issue. 6. Stay the course; Pursue the conversation of Economic Shifts (or not) in STEEM after SMTs

For me, this plan allows us to stay in line with my mission with Steemit as a Steem Development company, to “Code Steem so that it can help us Makes Great Communities.” Communities, for me, includes groups for shared interests, entrepreneurs and developers of apps.

I’m open to all input and requests for Economic Shifts and I believe yes it needs to be on Steem’s Roadmap.