Steemit once upon a time had a cap on how many times a blogger could post per day. This led to many bloggers becoming commenters but it also lead to an economics where popular posters were getting $500-1000 per quality post while many new bloggers were getting only $5-10. Of course this led to a situation where the new bloggers thought it was unfair and for this reason there was a hard fork which changed the economics of Steem.
The posting reward limit
Prior to the hardfork there was a reward limit for top level posts. This discouraged all bloggers from making more than 4-6 top level posts per day. At the same time during this time the payouts were daily not weekly, which again encouraged a rate of around 4 blog posts per day. When the hardfork was made it changed this by removing the limit of top level posts. When this happened many prominent bloggers knew it would dramatically change the economics and encourage shorter more frequent top level posts. As a result we are seeing this trend among bloggers along with complaints now about posting too often or posts being too short. In essence the complaints come in whether it's 4 long posts getting big rewards or many short posts getting small rewards.
The experiment and Hardfork 18
The experiment was supposed to fix the economics by flattening the reward payout line. This changed again the reward mechanism and adjusted the economics to favor new posters. When it happened the $1000+ payouts that established bloggers used to get turned into $100 payouts, but many more bloggers were able to get paid and most people including established bloggers were happy with this. After all $100 per post still wasn't bad and the price of Steem was also high at the time so the reward pool was seen as full.
When Hardfork 18 first happened everyone's payouts were very low for a full month. Prominent bloggers had to adjust to this and of course posted even when the payouts were $5, $10, and over time adapted. Hardfork 18 dramatically changed the economics.
Steem Power delegation
An additional feature was added to increase the ability of curators to manually curate. It is currently possible for anyone to delegate their Steem Power to anyone. This means if you think the curation is currently unfair or not good enough there is the option to delegate your Steem Power to people who do have time to curate on your behalf. This also has happened and decentralized the voting (it used to be that content wouldn't necessarily be discovered). In addition we also have the option to Resteem blogs which we think do have good content and bloggers with a lot of followers can help bloggers who are just entering into Steemit.
So where are the problems now?
Now begins the survey for readers of my blog. What do you think are the current problems?
- Do you think we should go back to the old economics of having a limit between 4-6 posts per day?
- Do you prefer longer more elaborate (longer to read) blogposts or do you prefer shorter posts?
- What do you feel is the right amount of posts a blogger should make per day?
Those are the three basic questions for now. This discussion will continue but the point to note is that under any of the economics a blogger was encouraged to post a minimum of 4 top level posts per day, and whether the economics were flatter, or under the old economics, there were bloggers who complained.