Author-Defined Proportion Of Curation Rewards Is A Questionable Idea

What is Hive account@rewarding.app?

Hive account@reward.app is a new third party service on Hive that enables an author to define the percentage of the author rewards of a post are redistributed to curators. The default is only 4 percent but the user can define the percentage to be between 0 and 100 percent. Hive account@reward.app is used by setting Hive account@reward.app as the beneficiary of 100% of the author rewards. The app owners take 1 percent and a user-defined percentage goes to the curators.

The motivation behind this app was the observation that the most deserving posts do not get as much as they should because large curators do not want to lose out on curation rewards by voting after other large curators.

You can read the announcement post for further details.

What is wrong with it?

By committing to sharing more than 50% of the rewards with curators is mathematically equivalent to vote buying. Any and all criticism leveled against vote buying can and should be leveled against committing to sharing more than 50% of the rewards with the curators. It's as simple as that.

(Ab)users will find ways to play the system.

Yes, the EIP introduced a separate downvoting pool to help stamp out abuse including vote buying. But how large a percentage of the downvoting pool is actually being used? In spite of the the existence of a separate pool the use of which does not cost the user anything, downvoting is a thankless job. There is no reward for it and may cause the downvoter to become a target of retaliatory downvoting. Thus any solution that relies on sufficient downvoting to happen to prevent abuse is unlikely to succeed.

NB: You should know that Hive account@curangel does not approve using Hive account@reward.app. The project has announced that it will be downvoting posts using Hive account@rewarding.app.

See: @curangel/posts-with-liquified-rewards-excluded-from-voting

While the existence of likwid has been unfortunate already, its use has been so small that having an own check for it didn't occur necessary. As reward.app "improved" on the concept by combining it with a vote buying mechanism, Hive account@curangel will step up early and work against these kind of schemes becoming the new normal.