@edicted long ago suggested that savings accounts with nominal interest could provide better ROI for investors without perverting curation with financialization, and I have strongly supported that idea, and still do. While HBD savings accounts with 20% interest (now reduced to 15%) advented, curation rewards remained potential and this allowed the financialization to continue to pervert curation.
There simply isn't any need for curation rewards. Myriad social media platforms enable folks to upvote content for subjective reasons, which is the definition of curation, and without receiving financial incentives for doing so. There is no lack of curation on any such platform. People have other values besides money that cause them to curate content, and in fact these values are far more valuable than mere money. Mike Tyson said that Don King (his manager) would sell his mother for a dollar, and curation rewards are perfect for the Don Kings of the world, but unnecessary for anyone that loves their mother more than a dollar - or any other societal value, like truth, justice, or apple pie.
Curation rewards are not only unnecessary, they are utterly contradictory to functional social media platforms, and Steem and Hive have well demonstrated why this is so.
Edit: also, the dust rule is simply economic reality. Transactions on the network have costs, and when they are below the cost of transmitting them, storing them, and etc., doing so drains the network of necessary resources. The dust rule isn't a conspiracy to cheat the poor, but is necessary to prevent spam and infinitesimally tiny transactions that have the same costs as ~$1M transactions from bleeding the network of resources.
I agree that "curation" has no practical value in theory, but it does seem to have a very legitimate psychological value. In fact before we even have this conversation I'd have to point out that calling it "curation" is a farce, as upvoting content doesn't curate anything and it is the frontends of Hive that curate all the content seen by almost all users.
The psychological value of curation is that it does seem limit greed a little bit by making giving money away a pill that becomes a little bit easier to swallow. I call it a "kickback" instead of "curation" because that's what it is after the changes we've made over the years. At this point it's a flat 50/50 partnership between ourselves and the person being allocated inflation.
We can try to make an argument that this is wasted inflation... but that would be a lie unless you believe we shouldn't be diluting stake that isn't powered up. Seeing as most stake not powered up sits on exchanges and acts as an existential threat to the network it would be foolish not to dilute it with inflation emissions like "curation". We don't want centralized agents with massive amounts of stake to have even more power.
I completely agree, except that curation rewards are both unnecessary and counterproductive to that dilution. They are counterproductive because they reward stake, which author rewards do not, and so act to concentrate stake. It is author rewards that best distribute stake, create resilience to hostile takeovers, and best leverage social media in that market.
All sorts of creators are trying to flee 2gen social media that is centralized, censored, and vulnerable to oppressive government. Decentralization is the critical 3gen advantage that can break that deathgrip governments are increasingly choking society to death with, as Twatter and Telegram demonstrate by capitulating to government oppression they cannot resist because they are centralized. Serve the market for free speech and Hive will moon, and that will better financially reward whales than maintaining their deathgrip on Hive governance through unrestrained taxation, curation rewards, and plutocratic control of the witnesses. It will also enable global resistance to increasing government oppression, and that is existentially more valuable than money, as history well reveals.
Unfortunately this is just the theory and not the actual reality.
Just like most people live paycheck to paycheck, so do most earners sell all their rewards right back to the big stake holders that gave them the reward in the first place.
This isn't even the theory.
It's just mathematically incorrect and you keep saying it.
Again, only non-powered up tokens are being diluted.
If I own 1% of the network and I earn 10% yield, I do not suddenly own more than 1% of the network.
The other accounts that only own 0.1% continue to own 0.1% after earning their 10% yield.
Truly I do not understand why people on Hive insist on making this mistake even after being corrected.
Tricks with maths don't alter the reality that author rewards go to folks independent of stake and curation rewards are functions of stake. The reality is that curation rewards are ROI for investors, were conceived of as ROI. Author rewards distribute stake. Whether the authors keep it or sell it is a different matter. Curators can - and do - pay attention to what authors do with their stake, and that affects curation.
I don't think you realize how many accounts would inherently become bad actors without the 50% kickback.
Like I said the psychological benefit alone is more than worth it.
Do you know how easy it would be these days to just create a couple dozen fake accounts and Sybil attack the network by 100% upvoting AI generated content? I guarantee you some curators do this shit already but it would be exponentially more without the curation mechanic.
And then it becomes just like steroids in professional sports where literally everyone is forced to break the rules in order to compete because "everyone is doing it". In many regards this is a huge problem with macro-capitalism as well. Curation largely fixes this problem, which is surprising but it does. We can see that it does.
That's what kind of happened with the bid bot era, those that didn't get involved got penalized hard.
Trying to talk to the user more it seems they're in the "stop downvoting it's ruining hive" and "downvotes are taxation and taxation is theft" category. They'd probably want something like steem or blurt where just as you say if no downvotes occur the network would instantly become a proof of stake piece of shit where posts are just placeholders to get your mining rewards from completely disregarding PoB. Kinda done talking about this at this point, as satoshi told @dan way back about something unrelated "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry."
wow how did I miss that I didn't know he was talking to dan lol wtf
that's wild
Then @ned was right and we need oracles to divine actual unique human users from bots and sock puppets. There are vote sellers on Hive today too. Should we ban upvotes? Perverting curation because some people are criminals isn't the solution. Ferreting out the criminals and flagging them into insolvency is. Is the solution to people taking steroids in sports to provide them to all contestants? That might even make sports more interesting to watch, as power lifters rip their own limbs off trying to push too hard.
Curation isn't the problem. Curation rewards are the problem. They financialize curation, allow profiteers to game it for financial returns, and this degrades the power of society to reward content per the subjective opinions of the voters. Curation rewards destroy curation by this mechanism, substituting financial interest in the curation rewards for the subjective evaluation of the content.
It's corruption. It destroys social media, just like Pfizer paying influencers to sing songs praising the jabs ruins music. There used to be an account on here, @sherlockholmes, that ferreted bot networks and that enabled people to flag them out of existence. He suddenly disappeared, probably because he ran into exactly such network run by oligarch(s) and was paid to quit. Some of these guys have tens of thousands of accounts. They spend a lot of time and money creating those accounts. They didn't just do it for shits and giggles. They did it to make money from them, and that's what they're doing with them, exactly as you said.
Curation rewards don't stop them. They make doing it more profitable to the criminals.
There's sound principles and there's corruption. Standing on sound principle allows society to prosper, enables folks to trust and rely on one another. Corruption prevents that, allows thieves and frauds to gain power over others and steal from them, even kill them and take their stuff.
That corruption is a big part of what has put Hive on life support by pushing hundreds of thousands of users off the platform. Unrestrained taxation is far worse, but corrupting content valuation reeks of unfairness, and that drives good people away.
You can make this argument like four years ago but you can't make it now.
There is no gaming the system.
It's a flat return.
No one has an advantage and you have yet to provide an example... because there is no example.
Anyone can upvote anyone they want.
Curation no longer rewards the accounts that voted at the 5 minute mark.