Most of you will probably agree that there are problems with how rewards are currently distributed. Content quality doesn't seem all that important and it's apparent that the top 10% authors get the majority of the rewards. Also more and more people are becoming aware of the self-voting problem. The root of all these problems is curation. This article will cover ways to change curation incentives and algorithms to improve the user experience on SteemIt.

Current problems

• Curation skill isn't monitored
• Curation rewards are too small
• Self-voting
• Popular content creators are over-rewarded
• Many curators are inactive (probably because rewards are so small)
• Not enough curators are actively searching for under-rewarded content
• There is no incentive to use flagging

Proposal:

Implementing the following systems might solve or improve some or all of the above problems.

1. Implement curation skill tracking

When you curate content, your curation will be rated based on the quality of the content and your action. When you upvote content and it ends up getting in the top 10 trending, your curation rating will increase dramatically. When you upvote content and it gets flagged heavily, you will lose significant curation rating.

The second factor that influences your curation change would be the curation rating of the curators that curated the content. If lots of whales with a bad curation rating voted on certain content and you vote on it as well, you will receive less curation rating or even lose curation rating compared to when you would upvote high quality content.

Implementing a curation rating will also add flagging incentive, because then curators actually get a reward, in the form of increased curation rating, when they flag bad or below average content when more curators flag that content as well.

Your curation rating will influence your curation rewards. The higher your curation rating, the higher the percentage of the curation reward pool you'll receive!

2. Increase curation rewards significantly for skilled curators

To solve 3 problems at once (low curation quality, curation inactivity and self-voting), the curation rewards for skilled curators should be increased significantly! Below is my proposal to achieve this:

Curation bonus pool

Next to the author pool and the currently existing curation pool, there could be a third pool implemented. This pool will make sure the curators that voted on content the earliest are very heavily rewarded. The way this would work is as follows:

The amount of shares in the bonus curation pool will be divided by starting at the first curator and ending at the last curator (if there are still shares left in the pool). When the bonus curation reward of a curator already exceeds the amount of shares that were assigned to the total reward pool by this curator, that curator won't get bonus curation rewards anymore. If there are still shares left after going through all curators, the remaining shares go back into the curation reward pool.

In reality this means that the first or first few curators will earn much, much more than the others when they vote on under-rewarded content that is older than 30 minutes. Voting on popular content creators in the first 30 minutes will earn less rewards, just like before (but still more than before). The whole curation meta would change so that you can't predict anymore which authors and which content will receive the highest rewards, so the content will be rated much more based on the quality of the content than the popularity of the author. Having more STEEM POWER also means having a bigger risk that you won't get paid enough curation rewards if you invest 100% voting power on certain content, so whales might want to spread out more unless it's exceptionally good content.

Example:

• 10% of the reward pool goes to curation bonus
• The curators all voted when the content was at least 30 minuted old (so no reversed-auction curation penalties)
• All curators voted at 100% voting power at 100% strength
• Curator 1 has 10,000 SP, which increases the total reward pool by $10
• Curator 2 has 500 SP, which increases the total reward pool by $0.50
• Curator 3 has 100,000 SP, which increases the total reward pool by $100
• Curator 4 has 5,000 SP, which increases the total reward pool by $5
• Curator 5 has 100,000 SP, which increases the total reward pool by $100

Total reward pool: $215.5
Curation bonus pool: $21.55

Curation bonus pool distribution:

• Curator 1 will receive $10 bonus curation rewards (remaining curation bonus pool is now $11.55)
• Curator 2 will receive $0.50 bonus curation rewards (remaining curation bonus pool is now $11.05)
• Curator 3 will receive $11.05 bonus curation rewards (remaining curation bonus pool is now $0.00)
• Curator 4 will receive $0.00 bonus curation rewards (remaining curation bonus pool is now $0.00)
• Curator 5 will receive $0.00 bonus curation rewards (remaining curation bonus pool is now $0.00)

As you can see the first 2 curators receive a higher curation reward than when they would self-vote (because the bonus curation rewards are added to the default curation rewards). The other curators didn't earn more than a self-vote, this means that they didn't find the content fast enough and/or over-rewarded it!

Conclusion

When all these changes are combined, there is finally perfect incentive for curators to do a perfect job of curating content, because you'll get rewarded and penalized based on your curation behavior. I'm sure there are still flaws in this implementation, but it might inspire someone to improve upon it and/or come up with even better ideas.

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