Over the past few weeks I've heard the same question over and over again. "Why does my payout keep going down?" There are two major reasons for this phenomena. The price of steem/steem dollars and the amount held in the reward pool.
The first has to do with the value of steem and steem dollars. When the prices fluctuate, so does the value of your post. The market has had quite a cooling off over the course of the past couple weeks and seems to just keep going down.
I don't believe this is anything to be concerned about. I am confident that it will pick back up and we will see it reach even greater heights before it's time to correct once again. This is the natural ebb and flow of the great crypto market. Things are volatile, price swings can be wild, but overall the market breaths with almost natural cycles.
Things have already started to improve greatly since the last crash, but I want to encourage everyone to be aware that the price will drop very frequently, whether you want it to or not, as this is the nature of the pool in which we play. Don't panic and most importantly, don't sell yourself short. You can even invest and buy in when the market is low!
The reward pool has dropped considerably since the hard fork. It is finally stabilizing and starting to a balance out once again. It may have been unusually high due to the whale no voting experiment that ended just in time for the hard fork to hit. We all experienced unnaturally high payouts over the past few weeks as a result.
You can expect the payouts you see now to much more accurately reflect what you will experience in the near future. Keep growing your network and improve your quality to pick things up once again!
Another recent trend (since the HF) is that new members especially seem to be having a difficult time attracting votes and followers. It's easy to see that there are less votes being spread around across the board, which is understandable since the max vote was changed to 2% from 0.5%. It's hard to see any benefits from this change, and I'm unsure why it was made in the first place- let alone at the same time as the other major linear rewards adjustment.
Post upvotes should drain 1% max from the voting power pool and comments should drain .5% max. This would allow for 20 full upvotes on posts, 40 full upvotes on comments or some combination of the two. A great improvement from the current 10 max that is especially painful for anyone who doesn't own a slider yet.
Self upvotes should be limited to 3 posts per 24 hours and 2 comments per 24 hours.
This would discourage self voting abuse and hopefully encourage higher quality content.
There may be a drop in the number of posts per day, but there would be no punishment for posting as many as you want.
The limit on self voting would leave more daily power to spread around to everyone else in the community.
When this is coupled with less overall posts, we could expect to see the average payout per post go up across the board.
A person should never be limited on how frequently they are allowed to post, only on how frequently they are allowed to give themselves the valuable upvote. This limitation would even encourage more comment interaction on posts, as a way to fulfill your daily self vote limit, if that is indeed what you choose to do.
Do you think it would be a good idea to earn the ability to upvote yourself by spreading wealth to the community first?
Currently, curation alone isn't enough incentive to convince people that it's better to give than it is to take.
We still see a handful of authors getting all of the high value votes simply because people know it's the most lucrative use of their voting power. Whether this content is truly the best on steemit or not is a debate for a different time. My concern is that it doesn't give the chance for other excellent content to reach the value and visibility that it may truly deserve.
In the end we want a good spread while still allowing us to be mindful of quality and presentation. I think this is the goal of most people, but the curation rewards can sometimes pervert our natural voting patterns. We shouldn't do away with the ability to earn by curating, but we should allow it to more accurately reflect the motivations of our community- which is to provide value for people who create quality content.
It's hard to say what would be a suitable solution to this problem. What do you guys think would be the proper incentive to spread your votes around while keeping curation rewards in mind?
If you don't know what whaleshares are yet, now is an excellent time to find out!
https://discord.gg/NTKXJhK
