Revamping Curation Is The Way To Increase Steem Power Demand

Revamping Curation Is The Way To Increase Steem Power Demand

If you haven’t been living under a rock, for the past month or so, it has been quite clear that the price of Steem has been rapidly falling. Although before the run up to $4 was most likely in a bubble and the system is in no danger of failing, as it has worked at this price before, I still believe there is a long term solution that needs to be found to fix this problem. Ned made a post yesterday talking about ideas he had, which mostly, in my opinion focused on lowering the supply entering the market, but this is only a symptom of the problem. My solution although a bit drastic addresses the problem which is a lack of incentive to purchase Steem and power up.

To begin, what are the incentives now? Well the main incentive is having weight while voting, as well as getting a daily return on the Steem Power you have in the system. These might seem like adequate incentives in theory, but in practice I think we are seeing something very different. The problem right now is even with the daily interest we are getting on our Steem Power, we have still been losing money due to the price drops. The interest, which is supposed to act like inflation protection, is actually doing nothing because as long as the price is falling, people are not going to want to move their Steem dollars or Steem into Steem Power. We need to give a greater incentive to hold and purchase Steem Power that will benefit us as a community in the long run. Sure we can wait for the price to fall and have people cash out and make it cheaper to enter the system, but this still doesn’t address the underlying problem.

So what is my solution? I strongly believe we need to move the payout split to 50:50 between authors and curators from the current 75:25 it is at. I know this will be controversial, especially because many authors today, INCLUDING MYSELF, are making essentially a living off the site, but ultimately it comes down to what is best for the community. We need to look at who is adding more value to the site, the authors or the curators. Depending on who you ask their answer might be different, but in my opinion both are equally as important. One cannot survive without the other and the payouts should reflect that.

Curating is supposed to be a heavy incentive for people to enter the system, but the earnings from it are subpar at best. For example, I have 20,000 Steem Power and my average earnings per day is around 6 Steem Power. That means my daily return on investment is .03% a day and only around 11% a year and that is with a pretty profitable curating strategy. Sure it will technically come out to a bit higher than 11% due to compounding but it still won’t make that much of a difference. A huge selling point to me was that if you choose to curate rather than create content you will also be able to earn a sufficient amount, but no one is going to put 20,000 Steem into Steem Power that they would have to wait 2 years to pull out if the reward of waiting is not sufficient enough. Selling Steemit as a platform where the users who upvote the content are equally as valuable as the users who create the content makes users actually want to buy Steem and convert it into Steem Power.

We should not focus on slowing down the supply that enters the market, but rather retaining and creating new users that will become active daily. Once people have upvotes that actually mean something we will see people flock to the system. Rather than just browsing reddit and upvoting, with no return, they would have a much better experience here. The majority of the people on the site are not authors but lurkers or readers and we need to cater specifically to that crowd because they will end up as the masses, should more come. Authors deserve to be paid for their work but the percentage of money that goes to payouts is a lot.

Like I stated before, I have been very successful and Steemit which is why I want to cut down my rewards, because if we continue in the direction we are currently going, it will become a race to the bottom , at which point everyone will leave. I strongly believe that splitting the curation rewards and author rewards equally can benefit the demand for Steem power in the long run and cause a higher amount of user retention within the system.

-Calaber24p