Will go to the moon,
Dont be afraid,
We will be rich very soon!
As you can see above, I really gave my best, but praising something has never been my strong point so that I better stick with what I am expert in: to criticize. :)
Curation still doesn't work as intended.
At first I would like to express that altogether my experiences with EIP haven't been that bad. I would say that the current state of STEEM is at least not worse than it was before HF 21, and some things have clearly improved (which, however, are not my topic today).
There won't be a German version this time, and instead of that you may read this comment, written in German language.
My point today is that I don't really share all the excitement about how great 'curation' would work nowadays.
Yes, there is the improvement that some whales and former bid bots have changed their voting behavior, but at the same time I think most of them are just auto upvoting a certain group of authors while they could upvote far more different, and especially also not so well known, small accounts. One of the positive exceptions in my eyes is @curangel.
Anyway, it's still the case that well known Steemians earn more money with very trivial and rather effortless posts like "Wow, I sold Steem Monsters today, and their price is so high now!" or "Earn Passive Income with Bitcoin ..." than less 'famous' users could ever make with ever so elaborated and well-researched articles.
Bad effects of the small 'curation window'.
Source: pixabay.
I think one of the main problems is the 'curation window' of only five minutes. Nobody who is upvoting manually rather than in an automated way is able to find new good content within the first five minutes after its appearance ... and if he could he still had to read and evaluate the post within a few minutes (do you really think that's possible? Come onnn!). :-)
That means most curation rewards aren't earned by real, manual curation but by auto upvoting the same authors again and again, and most of the time the 'curator' doesn't even know what he is actually rewarding.
As a consequence I upvote comments.
As someone who only upvotes manually, I have not the slightest chance to find, read, evaluate and possibly upvote new posts within the first five minutes after they have been published on the blockchain (especially as I cannot sit all the day in front of my computer lurking for new posts). I know, I am a very slow person, but be honest: YOU also can't! :)
I can't spread my upvotes over the whole day but place most of them within a narrow time frame, and most of the time when finding great stuff from at least somewhat popular authors, the reward already exceeds ten or more dollars, so that concerning curation rewards it's not really worth it anymore. As people are so triggered to vote as fast as possible, my upvotes often are the last ones at all. :)
As a consequence I started to upvote either great posts of unpopular authors or comments (instead of the posts itself) in great content of popular authors, because anyway I have no chance to compete with all these auto voters and also don't want to further reward them for upvoting posts as fast as possible without reading anything! As I always want to know what I am actually rewarding, I won't use any auto upvote option myself.
From now on it will be an exception for me to upvote posts with a pending reward greater than ten dollars!
Possible solutions.
I think ...
-
Either there shoulnd't be a curation window at all, whereby then the curation reward should only depend on the vote weight but not on the date of the vote. In that case ones decision should depend on the quality of the post only and not on the fact who else has already (not) upvoted the post.
@pharesim opposed that then the 'maximizers' would simply upvote 10 random posts per day, to minimize their effort. Possible ... but then I ask why we are having free downvotes nowadays ...? :) -
Or we could think about a really long curation window of, lets say, a whole day or even more. In that case it wouldn't be so obvious when upvoting would lead to the highest curation reward. So hopefully it would be worth to concentrate on the quality of content again, instead of the date of one's upvote.
I tend to prefer the first option. Anyway, in my opinion the problem how to encourage Steemians to seek and upvote quality content is still not completely solved.