@samupaha I hope you are right, but it’s pretty disappointing to see the way it works now.

@tracemayer Do the current incentives really provide better gatekeeping? It seems to me that they don’t, unless you think the judgement of the major stakeholders is so vastly superior and that they are right in mainly upvoting each others’ posts.

Isn’t it pretty much understood by now that “good” content is mainly content by people who have already been making a lot of money from their posts, and aren’t these mainly the well-known figures who may have valuable things to say but they still seem to be overcompensated by it? And they are also highly compensated when they put out drivel.

Are the whales just gaming it for the time being until people get too annoyed and then they’ll stop, or do some major changes need to be made proactively?

It seems to me that encouraging people to “pan for gold” (in curating) the way it currently works is really encouraging people to use their time unproductively, watching and waiting to pounce first rather than doing something more useful with their time. Good or “good” content is going to tend to rise to the top anyway, so why over-incentivize/over-compensate the first few people who discover it? I have the impression, especially with so many articles having now been written about it, that there is now a large number of people just sitting around trying to be the first to upvote what will become popular content.

Some whales and dolphins are trying to draw attention to “hidden gems” but even their criteria is confusing. Some of the gems aren’t such high quality content, and some of them are very high quality content but by already pretty popular authors.

One final thing I want to mention is that I think it’s a bad idea that posts can’t earn after four weeks. This de-incentivizes people who are building up content for communities that barely exist on Steemit yet.

Thanks for the opportunity to think about and discuss this.