Why curation rewards are a bad thing

in blurt •  4 years ago  (edited)

Imagine for a moment, that you have a balance in the top 20 of accounts on this blockchain.

Imagine that you are holding so much money here with the intention to fight inflation and hold on to your savings.

Imagine that in order for you to do this, you have to spend 1-2 hours a day reading mostly garbage articles and picking some to vote on.

Imagine that you have absolutely no literary or creative talent, and your selections are widely regarded as bad.

But nevertheless, your votes push this garbage to the top of the trending feed, and you collect your de-facto interest payments.

I can understand the philanthropic motive, to give struggling artists some patronage so they can keep producing their great art. Or maybe it's just sympathy.

But with curation rewards, firstly, half (or whatever eventual split) is going to voters, of which the bulk are your peer whales. So this charitable activity is contaminated with competition for what essentially amounts to interest payments, in a forum full of people mostly poor artists wanting to promote their work and find patrons.


People think it would be unreasonable to give a large reward to users who 'only hold a big load of tokens'.

Firstly, those dirty capitalists are the reason why the token has any value at all.

Secondly, 'big reward' is relative. Relative to post rewards, definitely there should be no parity between them as it currently is at 50/50.

I would argue that 10% of the forum rewards pool should be segregated for non-vote staking, which amounts to 6.5% of total supply, and eliminate curation reward altogether, so the only reason for big holders to vote is because they want to have a beneficial impact on the mostly poor artists who are creating content.

6.5% interest is not excessively high, but it for sure isn't as low as the pissy 2.5% for Blurt Power that is not being used to vote. I think it's reasonable.

With this scheme, we return the social, charitable reason for big holders to vote to its ostensibly philanthropic purpose, and we give those users who participate by being buyers and holders an option that does not require more of their time. Or the construction of elaborate voting trails.

All users matter

Not just minnows posting to gain a share of the inflation, not just whales voting to lift starving artists, not just people who want to park their money and don't care where so long as the reward is reasonable and steady.

The current arrangement, and all of the proposals by others involved in contributing ideas, set up exclusive incentives that interfere with each other.

Also, just to clear up a point - less votes does not mean less rewards.

If less votes are cast, the distribution still gives 100% of reward pool that is due to be paid.


My proposal would actually raise the amount of funds going directly to those doing the work to produce content, and eliminate contradictory incentives between the top and bottom of the economic ladder.

Please think about it and comment and play out the scenarios, let's get this thing right so that we all get the best experience and reward and our platform grows rapidly in userbase and market cap.

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