Hello, I have been asked several times now about my opinion concerning Blurt, and just a few hours ago I noticed that also @jacobgadikian, one of the Blurt founders, had written a comment under one of my STEEM posts in which he indicated interest in my point of view.

So how to start? Maybe with something positive: I really like the attitude of the founders and developers of Blurt to ask stake holders and interested users about their opinions! That's nothing I experienced really often (euphemistically worded) during my nearly four years on STEEM! Of course that doesn't mean they always have to agree or follow every given advice - in the end they are responsible and have to meet the important decisions themselves -, but at least they listen.

Apart from that, in the following I would like to discuss what I like and dislike on Blurt. It may well happen that not every information I got about Burt is correct, so please correct me in case you spot any mistakes!

What I like:

• For me it seems the small transaction fee per byte is a clever solution to curb spam.

• If I am correct, it is discussed to increase author reward and reduce curation reward (respectively let the author choose the percentages for both).
  As anyway on STEEM, and especially HIVE, in most cases upvoting happens automatically (and thus doesn't deserve to be called 'curation', a term which includes the work of reading and evaluating), I see no reason to reward this kind of 'easy work' that much. Here I wrote more about why in my opinion 'real' curation nearly doesn't take place on HIVE and STEEM.
  What is needed are authors who make the effort of creating interesting, creative quality content!

• It seems that software development and improvement happens rather fast, and many ideas of the community are considered to be implemented.

• I tend to think that it was a good decision to abstain from having a BBD, not to unnecessarily complicate things.

What I dislike:

• I understand why the 'Blurt people' are against downvoting: in the past there was much drama about crazy whales flagging smaller users because of disagreement on opinion or personal reasons.

  However, without flags there won't be any means to discourage plagiarizing, farming, self- and circle-voting.
  I know that for example @birdinc wrote in Discord: "We want people voting for themselves on Zapata. I never understood why this behavior was so discouraged on Steem."
  That was concerning Zapata, but the visions of these two blockchains appear to be rather similar.

  In my opinion the problem with self-voting, circle-voting and farming is: if everybody upvotes themselves (respectively their alt accounts / 'circle-friends') anyway, then there is no incentive to a) create quality content, and b) interact with other users, both things which are essential for the attractivity of a community for potential new users/investors.

  Just look at the trending page, at 'German trending' or at what I do myself, and you will see that the absence of flags leads to (short term) egoistic behaviour which in the long run destroys the value of the platform.

  Even if you disagree with the above, there still is the inability to combat plagiarism and other abuse without flags.

  My idea is to have flags but at the same time kind of a user elected committee to curb personal flag wars. You may read more here and here.

  In case you don't like the idea of the committee, just find an alternative (for example that only the elected top witnesses were allowed to flag etc.)!

  If you insist not to have flags, then create incentives to upvote as many different users as possible. I had for example the idea of 'diminishing returns' when upvoting the same accounts again and again. In that case however you would need to find a way to handle users with lots of accounts.
  Apart from that you could think about rewarding users with a high "Voting CSI" value in SteemWorld (or something similar).

• Tell me if I am wrong, but it seems one cannot see one's old STEEM posts in Blurt. For me my old articles are precious collections of my own thoughts and ideas which I wouldn't want to miss in case I would switch the blockchain!

• In general it concerns me if an already rather small crypto community gets split in more and more little fractions ... I wonder how this will end ... and with limited available time it won't be easy for me at all to post in several different social networks.

What I suggest:

• In my eyes the short curation window of only five minutes is very bad for real curators. It leads to a behaviour that users don't read content anymore but prefer to upvote these authors automatically whose posts show a high probabiltiy to receive many big upvotes.
  There should be either no or a very large curation window (of a few days?), so that it's not so easy to spot the moment of maximal curation reward. I see no reason why it should be more profitable to upvote fast than slow. I wonder why so many people still buy the myth of the "early manual curator who discovers quality content". :-)
  I wrote more about this here and here.

• There is an ongoing discussion about the rewards curve.
  I am in favour of the convergent linear curve because it discourages self-voting. (Some time ago I wrote an article about that myself.)
  A linear rewards curve combined with no flags is a real self-vote paradise (but I wonder what this would mean for the future value of the Blurt token ...).