Let me just preface all of this with the fact that I’m still new here, and maybe there’s some specific reason for the 7 day payout limit that I don’t know about. Maybe it’s even a limitation of the technology that would make it really difficult. Please let me know in the comments if there are specific reasons, or just let me know your opinion. And now for a bit of a rant. 🙂
Also, I misspoke a couple times in this video and that’s why there are subtitles overlaid on my face a couple times. I was a little too tired when I recorded it. 😆
What is the point of the 7 day payout limit? I keep searching around for a convincing argument for why this exists, but I can’t find it. It feels weird that we’re all building this big permanent, immutable blockchain full of content, but its permanence isn’t reflected in the payout system.
If one of the goals of this blockchain is to reward content creators for what they make, then the 7 day payout limit doesn’t fully reflect that value, just a snapshot of it. If we’re to truly reward content, then it should be rewarded for as long as its on the blockchain and bringing people value, which hopefully will be for many years. We should all be allowed to decide where to direct our voting power, regardless of the age of a post.
The more I try to learn about cryptocurrency, and the Steem blockchain in particular, the more I stumble on old Steemit posts answering my questions. But they’re months or years old at this point, so I have no way of rewarding the author. Let’s fix this problem!
The best reason that I’ve heard for the 7 day payout window is to help eliminate reward pool abuse. But hopefully this is a temporary problem and one that we can learn to either self-regulate or wait for a fix to the blockchain itself.
An Example With YouTube
To give a sense of how much people can earn from old posts, I’m going to take a look at YouTube, where people can earn money by showing ads on their videos. As a first example, lets take a look at one of the most popular YouTubers right now: Casey Neistat. He has over 9 million subscribers, 2 billion views, and has uploaded 876 videos. The most important stat that I want to look at are his views per day, which you can see if you scroll down on his Social Blade page.
He’s hovering at around 600,000 views per day, on days when he doesn’t even upload a video. There is a big spike whenever he does upload something, but when you consider that his recent videos are getting about 1.5 million views, and that he’s consistently getting over 500,000 views per day even if he hasn’t uploaded anything in awhile, you can see how much his huge catalog of old videos affects his income.
I also want to take a look at Louis Thomas’s channel (@louisthomas) for some info about a channel that’s isn’t as big. I hope he doesn’t mind me talking about him here. 😀
Louis has about 94,000 subscribers, over 5 million views, and has uploaded 305 videos. He had a small lull of posting videos between March 7th and 12th, but you can see the slowest day still had 4,500 views and the most views he’s had in the past two weeks is around 20,000. So even on days where he doesn’t post a new video, he’s still getting a nice consistent stream of income.
How Can We Fix This?
I think one temporary option is to just circumvent this problem on each Steem site. I’m trying to think through a solution to this for the site I’m building, and hopefully there’s something that will work well enough. But long term, this will need to be addressed on the blockchain itself. I think this would eliminate a pretty huge shortcoming of Steem if it is implemented and I’m really curious to hear if it’s in the works.
What do you think about the payout window? If I’m missing something and there’s a clear reason for all of this, please let me know! I just can’t seem to figure it out.
Thanks for watching! 😀
Music by Chillhop: http://youtube.com/chillhopdotcom
Globuldub - Foreign Exchange: https://soundcloud.com/globuldub/foreign-exchange
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