As I mentioned in my previous post Is SteemIt.com Turning Into Federated Media?, recently I've noticed a lot of "Featured author" posts.
The hope is that this is win-win because the smaller user gains by the larger exposure the large user brings, and the larger user gains because they get to keep the SP (and maybe that's all ... for now). But the smaller user has to give up some "freedom" by playing by the larger user's "rules". If the trend continues, the larger user's will be able to start taking more and more of the pie ... it doesn't end well for the small user (or the middle-sized user in the end).
The second to last sentence of my previous post was
Is this not what curation rewards are about?
As I was thinking about this, I was reading @hisnameisolllie's recent post What's Important to Steemit’s Longevity? - Inspired by @anyx ‘Tragedy of The Commons’ and the part about Curation rewards caught my eye:
It seems that on July 4th, the scales were tilted far in favor of content creation vs curation. The Steem White Paper, on page 35, seems to put them on equal footing (as @ hisnameisolllie points out above).
As a newer user I don't know all of the details on why this was changed. If you have insight please let me know. Regardless of the intentions, do you think its possible that this has contributed to the rise of the "featured author" over the "curated independent publisher" since curation is not as profitable? If so, should we undo that change to try to encourage more independent content creation?
Dr. Bryan
Image credits: The first image is a screenshot of @hisnameisolllie's article, image 2 is a screenshot of the Steem Whitepaper p. 35 in the Allocation & Supply section.
Thanks for reading.
Bryan's Previous Post: Is SteemIt.com Turning Into Federated Media?
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