$65 Million USD is paid to authors and curators in a year on Steemit. Some of us, including me, have suspicions that the content posted on Steemit in one year is not worth $65 Million USD. We believe that there's some reward pool abuse going on.
If each Steem Power holder cast at least 10 votes each day, there wouldn't be any rewards left to be abused. If 10 votes in a single day is not possible, it is also OK to aim for an average of 10 votes a day. However, that is not possible for all Steem Power holders.
In a previous post, I have proposed to remove the reward pool for authors and curators altogether and to introduce a tipping system as a solution to the reward pool abuse problem. I received a lot of feedback about that proposal, which I want to discuss in this post.
Solution Proposal
Before discussing the feedback, here's a summary of the solution to the problem.
- Remove the reward pool for the authors and curators.
- Users can tip posts, comments, and authors that they choose, from their own funds, as much as they want.
- The tips that a post or comment receives is used to determine its ranking in the site. That ranking will be used to populate the homepage, trending, and hot tabs.
- Keep the rewards for the witnesses.
- Keep the interest/dividends for the Steem Power holders.
Why would a Steem Power holder tip?
A Steem Power holder is a long term investor of the Steemit platform. Steemit will go through three different stages. The first stage is when the investor gives and the third stage is when the investor receives.
Stage 1
The investors tip a portion of their Steem holdings to valuable posts, comments, and authors. This attracts quality authors to the system who regularly publish valuable posts.
Stage 2
Quality posts, authors, and conversations attract the general public to Steemit. Some of the newcomers want to get engaged more. To do that they need to buy more Steem Power than their initial 0.50 Steem. Steem starts to appreciate slightly.
Stage 3
After the mainstream adoption by general public, companies, institutions, and even governments start to use Steemit. In order to increase their influence on the general public, these entities start to purchase Steem Power in great quantities, which increases the price significantly. The investors book huge profits.
The Steem Power price surges in times of events such as US elections, with competing parties starting bidding wars on Steemit to get their posts on the homepage and trending tab.
How would curators make money?
Curators who randomly upvote posts won't be rewarded in this system and that is a good thing. However, a new class of serious curators will emerge. They will act similar to the editors on Medium.
Steem Power investors who don't have the time to go through posts are going to allocate a portion of their funds to these serious curators. Each curator, investor pair will have their own conditions about how much to tip on posts and how much the curator is allowed to keep.
As a result, curation might as well become a full time job for some serious curators who know what they are doing and not randomly upvoting posts.
In the current system, it is easy to upvote, because it is not your money.
Actually, it is your money in the current system as well. In the current system, by keeping your money in Steem Power, you are donating 6.5% of your funds to the reward pool for authors and curators, in one year. That money is than donated to the authors and curators that are selected collectively through the voting mechanism.
In the tipping system, you are going to decide on the percentage you want to tip and you are going to decide on which author, post, comment, and eventually editor to tip. Moreover, you will be able to decide the amount of each tip.
What Do You Think About This System?
Would you like to see it implemented on Steemit? Do you have any questions or remarks? Let me know in the comments. If you like the idea or you want to invite others to discuss the idea, please resteem this post.
Disclosure and Disclaimer
At the moment of writing this post, I owned some Steem Power tokens. This post is for information purposes only and not intended to be business or investment advice.