Good Curation is an essential part of the STEEM economy because it encourages people to write good content and they are rewarded for it. There is an incentive built into the design of the STEEM rewards that also rewards people for good Curation. If you Upvote a post that is subsequently Upvoted by a lot of others, you are rewarded with STEEM POWER when that post is paid out.
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When I first joined STEEM I could see that Curation was a very important part of the long term success of the platform and so I spent a bit of time figuring out how it worked and set myself to the task of being an effective Curator. Not only would I try and upvote good content (by my own judgement) but I would also try to anticipate and upvote popular content (by others judgement). I actually got reasonably good at it and for a while there I was regularly appearing in the Top 3 of the @abh12345 “Curation League” every week (to the point where I am sure he got sick of seeing my name up there). You can see his latest post about it HERE where you will see I have now dropped down to 8th.
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What changed? Well Curation was a lot of work and with the STEEM DOLLAR pumping as it is I thought I would change my focus a bit. The Curation League is benchmarked against the “Amount of SP earned per 1000 Steem Power Owned” so I decided to delegate 1000 SP to one of the vote bid bots. Now before you start boo-ing and hissing at me for being a sell-out let’s not be naïve, this is happening ALL OVER the platform.
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In the 3 weeks of the Curation League where I was focusing on it, I was averaging about 4.138 SP per 1000 STEEM POWER (Reference 1 2 3). At todays prices of STEEM at $5.28 that’s about $21.85 USD worth of reward per week (yes, I could price this in Bitcoin but I’m estimating that more people reading this would be more familiar with USD). At the time I was reasonably proud of the fact I was performing well as a Curator and certainly much higher than the average Curator was performing!
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Now I have a look at what my earnings are from having 1000 SP delegated to a voting bot. It varies but I might be getting an average of about 1.8 SBD per day. 7 days in a week multiplied by the current price of $6.98 is about $87.95 USD worth per week. This is over 4 times the ROI I was getting from being a top tier Curator….and as opposed to my old Curation workload, delegating to a bot takes ZERO effort.
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So is it any real wonder that there has been an explosion in the number and strength of the voting bots? Is this a trend away from effective curation and toward vote-selling that will ultimately hurt the platform and discourage new users from bothering to produce good content? Well maybe, but don’t shoot the messenger!
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At the end of the day, people like me are pragmatic and many are happy to work within the spirit of the platform as long as it is not a personal detriment to do so. I am not claiming to be any kind of saint or pariah, but I personally try and find a balance between doing what’s best for the platform and the community, and making sure I am getting some kind of reward for it too.
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I know that many people are happy with the high STEEM DOLLAR price and I’ll say it again, as an Author I am very happy to see an increase in my rewards. But if we pretend that this phenomenon has no adverse side-effects then we are kidding ourselves. I have already written about how Speculation killed the STEEM DOLLAR Utility and you can add Curation Incentive to the casualty list.
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The solution here may be as simple as rewarding Curators with 50% SBD but I acknowledge that this would require a significant code change and may have other repercussions. My point here is that we should be discussing these knock-on effects of a high STEEM DOLLAR and not just making out like pigs at the trough. If we keep pretending that a high STEEM DOLLAR is all good and everything is working perfectly as designed then we are deluding ourselves.
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https://www.shoutmeloud.com
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http://www.wabuseducationfund.org
http://www.businessinsider.com
https://forum.bodybuilding.com
https://mysocalledfalsememory.com
https://talonsphilosophy.wordpress.com
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