In The steemit curation nightmare: plagarism, spam bots, ghost profiles and cross-posting I listed some reasons why I think curation is difficult on steemit. That post was focused purely on the content side. In this post, I want to focus on the reward system.
The old curation system
Up until about four weeks ago, if you were the first to upvote a soon-to-be-popular post, the more reward you'd get. This results in bots being written that would automatically upvote a post almost instantly, an effect still being seen today.
The new curation system
>Starting *TODAY all curation rewards earned by voting in the first 30 minutes after a post is made will be shared with the author. If you vote immediately after a post is made, then 99.94% of the curation reward will go to the author. If you vote after 15 minutes, then 50% will go to the author. Any votes made 30 minutes or later 100% will go to the curator. This only applies to the curation rewards. The author still gets at least 50% of the total rewards.
This is a big improvement on the old system, but it still has some potential issues.
The potential issues
There are three potential issues with this system:
- Bots can effectively block out all curation rewards by voting instantly. Although the bot doesn't benefit, neither does anyone else;
- Bots can help one another out. The author bot posts an article, the curator bot instantly upvotes it causing the author bot to get 99% of the curation reward.
- There are no rewards for downvoting, which plays just as important a role in curation as does upvoting