Curation rewards is the reason bidbots exist...
No. Linear rewards, the delegation protocols, and the reduced daily vote target are the reason bid-bots exist. But as usual, nobody ever wants to acknowledge that. Instead, people would rather whine about how everything is still “unfair” and that invested users shouldn’t be allowed to earn from their investment.
No one needs to be paid to upvote good posts, and we see this on every other social media platform in the world.
The same is true about posting on social media: it happens on every other social media platform in the world. So why should authors here expect to be paid?
But tell me why users ought to buy/hold STEEM and power it up if there’s no incentive to do so and the tokens are only flowing out of the system to people who want to “get paid for blogging.” What do you suppose would happen to prices if invested users could no longer earn from their investment and how would that affect all of these bloggers who think that they aren’t paid enough for posts that mostly go unnoticed and unread?
Instead of making absurd claims about “rent-seeking,” maybe try understanding economics and investing a bit more. It also wouldn’t hurt to learn about the protocol history and many of the discussions that have taken place here for the past three years. A lot of the things you complain about were predicted...and some of it is directly related to the reduction of curation rewards.
Here...you can find some explanations and discussions dating back to early 2017 in this post and those linked in it:
https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-david/improved-curation-rewards-are-still-a-necessity
I appreciate your substantive reply. I do agree with some of your points, but not your general thesis (if I am grasping it).
Because the legacy model of social media centralizes emuneration of user created content, and creating the Steem model that should handily and rapidly render them utterly obsolete, due to the recognition that it is content created by users that imbues platforms with value, and users choosing to receive that value rather than simply exist for the benefit of overlords. Kinda a simple concept, really.
This actually ignores the previous point: that the value of the content springs from those very users that create it, and emunerating them for it reflects not only that, but creates strong motivation to adopt Steem by those that create the value of social media, the users. If Steem cannot flourish by creating a market that emunerates creators that imbue Steem with value, then the model in place is entirely retarded. I note that Steem seems to be only pretty retarded, as it hasn't perished yet. It sure can do better, and precluding free market exchange by locking up tokens via SP is less necessary as the market grows. There is certainly sound reason to use such gimmicks when establishing a nascent platform, and traditional investing shows that such vesting isn't novel to Steem.
Regarding what would happen to prices if investors were relegated to capital gains to profit from their investments, just as all investments throughout history have done, I note that would depend on the gains generated by the investment. I have made the analogy before, but allowing investors to snipe the vast majority of the products of the vehicle is asinine and completely counterproductive to the goal of generating capital gains. If this was a broom factory instead of a content mill, letting investors take most of the brooms before the company could sell them to generate profits would be easily recognized as insane. Letting investors snag the majority of rewards, which is what is happening, is directly preventing rewards from reaching users, and inhibiting growth which produces capital gains.
As for implying that creators are unrealistic for expecting rewards commensurate to the value of their posts, there is a bit of truth to that, but it's far more realistic to recognize that the creation market is failing to grow and generate capital gains because rewards are being monopolized through rent seeking behaviour, through bidbots, self votes, circle jerks, etc. Instead of sneering at the poor who expect to be compensated for being the market Steem needs to succeed, and who vote with their feet, effecting an extremely poor retention rate for Steem, reasonably attract the actual market with nominal rewards to keep them engaged and creating value in Steem.
Instead of mocking my fair representation of bidbots and curation that only cares about ROI, which is certainly the definition of rent seeking, you could note that trending shows that the extant situation regarding curation is that it could hardly degrade content quality less than it does. There is almost no correlation between content quality and rewards. That is not the fault of creators, but of rent seeking profiteers.
You know it's broken, and getting worse. Retention continues to decrease. Steem price is little more than BTC's tail, only following the general market for crypto rather than generating value through it's use case - which is orders of magnitude more valuable than it's competitors. The reason is that creation is denigrated rather than compensated, and substantial stake holders virtually completely ignore anything except ROI for their stake - the very definition of rentier income.
Curation rewards are the bizarro world mechanism to generate capital gains, the exact opposite of how to create growth, a robust market, and profit.
Pretend that capital gains haven't successfully motivated investors for thousands of years, and that curation rewards diminishing author rewards, which provide direct incentive to create the content that is the only source of value for Steem, will improve it, yet ignore that actual data produced by the actual market for Steem. You do you.
But don't expect Steem to moon when whales are seizing the means of production from actual producers, who are staying away in droves, and then decreasing the incentive for those producers even more by eschewing the model that has been employed to fund development to date (Stinc spent it's stake to fund development) and taxing author rewards to do so. That's just silly.
I would like someone to respond to the following point, because I have felt the same way and need to hear a counter-argument that makes sense if I am to change my mind on it.
Yeah, I have a response to that...
This isn’t a broom factory and there is no “company” selling anything in order to generate profit.
For some reason, he seems to believe that there is an entity taking stuff from one group and selling it to others. The problem is, if this were even happening (which it is not), it would be authors “taking” rewards (tokens) without any investment or risk - and that have monetary value due to investors/speculators - and then indiscriminately selling those tokens at market prices, driving down those prices and any chance at capital appreciation for investors
In other words: the analogy doesn’t actually apply to anything happening here, but if it did, it would apply to the exact opposite group than the one that the commenter continually marginalizes.
Thank-you for the response. That answer seemed to have opened a can of worms, so perhaps you wouldn't mind answering some more questions:
If there IS no company/product, then what the heck are people "investing" in? Generally, there is some form of business taking place that investors feel could grow their money as the business grows.
If the ONLY business taking place is similar to a bond or interest-bearing bank account, where you lend money so that someone else can use it; who is the borrower paying the interest and why would they?
If inflation is the source of all "income" then there really isn't any income, is there? The numbers get bigger, but the value goes down.
Why bother writing anything at all then? Just get 2 accounts and vote for each other on 1-word posts, 10 times per day.