Effective immediately, all posts made using STEM tags (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, STEM, STEMGeeks) will only receive 25% of the post rewards if the post does not use https://stemgeeks.net front end.
Curators will always receive full curation rewards and are not affected by this.
STEM has the largest penalty for not using the STEMGeeks front end. We started with a 50% burn of rewards, but we feel 75% is a better fit. While this is a very aggressive stance, there are good reasons for it.
The primary reason for this penalty is to minimize the rewards that go to those on the fringe of the community. A good example is users posting on other platforms about bitcoin and tagging it as #technology as while technically correct, it really doesn't provide content that is STEM in nature.
By reducing rewards of those who add our tags to their post but do not participate in the community, we can reduce the amount of rewards going to those that are not specifically targeting our community.
The original vision of STEM was rewards those creating and engaging with STEM topics. Rewarding content that has no relationship to STEM topics with tokens is counter productive to our mission.
Other communities who have implemented these same penalties typically use 10-20% penatlies, and while this is a good strategy, we feel a more aggressive stance is more in line with our goals.
This change is already in place and you will notice a significant reduction in author rewards when using STEM tags without using our front end.
While we are happy with this change, and feel it is in our best interest, we are always open to feedback if you want to join us on our Discord Server you are welcome to come discuss it.