Guys, meet Fred, the farmer.
Fred is a part of a farming community, where everyone works on and shares the same piece of land.
The land is split into two parts, and farmers in the community are free to choose where they want to work, and can take home whatever harvests they get.
This is land area A.
Land area A is nice, futile land, but still requires a lot of work and patience before it can reap any harvests.
This is land area B.
Land area B is already full of fully grown, delicious carrots (yes, those are carrots).
Where would Fred like to work? Of course, Fred would like to work on land area B. Instead of spending the time and effort growing the seeds in land area A, Fred can just take the already grown carrots from land area B and sell them. Great, right?
Well, Fred and all his farmer friends farmed their hearts out on land area B. In the end, the seeds on land area A died out, and this is what became of land area B:
The moral of the story is, in order for a community to be successful, the interest of the individual and community must be aligned. If individual interests conflict with the interest of the community, then it will be very hard for the community to succeed.
Right now, we are seeing a conflict of interests between curators and the Steem community. Originally, curation was meant to be a way for great content to be discovered. The curator, or discoverer is compensated for discovering great content, and the community gets to fully take advantage of that content.
However, with the way curation works now, curators have no incentive to discover new, hidden posts. Trying to find good and interesting content from the plethora of posts every hour is extremely hard work. Meanwhile, it is much easier, and much more rewarding to simply follow Power posters, whose posts are consistently doing extremely well, and upvote their new posts as soon as they come out. A simple bot could execute this strategy perfectly without any additional work by the person, and this method almost always guarantees a good payout to the "curator".
But the thing is, curating posts that are already popular does not benefit the community at all. We would've discovered content from these popular posters without the curation anyway. Curating these posts give very little value to the community.
Furthermore, because there is a lot more incentive for curators to curate these already popular posters and their posts, it becomes even harder for less well known posters to be found, even if they have amazing content. As a result, these posters, who could've been great assets to Steem, end up leaving.
For good content writers to stay in Steem, there must be a good discovery mechanism.
On the other hand, for posters who already have an established presence on Steem, they don't really need the help of curators to make their content visible anymore. So why are curators still taking away the same chunk of value that these posters create?
I believe we need a overhaul of the algorithm that determines curation rewards vs posting rewards.
First, we note that there are three main groups of people to consider:
For a good content creator who is just starting out and not well known, hoping to hit the jackpot and make big money from one or two posts is not their primary concern. Rather, they want a better way for their content to be discovered, so that they can slowly build up a audience and provide consistent value to the community over time.
For top posters who already have an established presence, they no longer depend on curators to help them become visible. Of course, curation does give a measure of how much value their particular post has, and needs to be used to determine how much reward they should get for their post.
Curators are they key to the success of Steemit. If good incentives are given such that new, hidden good content can routinely be discovered, Steemit can flourish. If not, Steemit will end up stagnating.
To align the interest of all three groups, I believe the solution is that the algorithm needs to take into consideration how established the poster is, and to distribute rewards based on this value.
If a poster is relatively unknown, then curators should get a higher percentage of the rewards, should the post gain any
If a poster is already well established, then curators should get a lower cut of the rewards, as the value they provided is much lower than if they discovered good content from a new creator.