While talking about some things with the curators of OCD yesterday, this idea (which originally existed but was abused very early in steem's history - even before the payouts were initially sent out and could be transferred). 

Right now what you can do with reward.app is set it as beneficiary to receive liquid rewards instead of 50% being in Hivepower, this is pretty much what 99.99% of people use it for.

The other thing you can do with it is send it a memo with a % value [0-100] to forfeit your author rewards to go to curators. By default reward.app does this with 4% of your author rewards which is why you often see reward.app send you small sums of hive and/or hbd.

Unfortunately not many used the second option, I've some times used it on posts I felt didn't deserve a lot of rewards knowing there may be quite a bit of autovotes waiting for me and other times I keep forgetting to set reward.app as beneficiary. So the data to see how this is used in general (bad or good marketing/promotion) is very limited due to almost no usage.

This now brings me to my idea I had and I'm a bit skeptical if anyone's going to be using it but I figured I'd ask anyway to see what you think. 

The thing that existed very early on in Steem was that part of the author rewards would automatically go to commenters. Of course you can now imagine how it was easily abused since the blockchain would calculate that and just give commenters part of the rewards, but the way I thought of it would be like this:

Author makes a post, sets reward.app as beneficiary like usual but before he posts he'd send reward.app a memo indicating the % the author would like his post rewards to go to comments.

As I mentioned, there already is a command for this right now in place which determines the percentage of post rewards that instead go back to curators, but I assume this could easily be done with a different command, example, memo: "comment 50" which would mean take 50% of the post rewards and spread them out to the comments. 

To avoid abuse, and since this is something the author has to decide on to begin with if he wants to use or not, reward.app would also have a bot that would check which comments the author curated in said post and spread the rewards evenly among those comments. If there were 2 comments, author voted the first comment up with a 40% vote, the second with a 10% vote the post rewards would be split 80% to the first comment and 20% to the second comment. 

So this would give the choice back to the author how to distribute the rewards, mitigating any abuse. 

Why?

Well, engagement hasn't been great on the platform for a while now, partly cause everyone is too busy being a content creator and partly because the EIP introduced the reward curve tax which made most small votes from small stakeholders worth a lot less and a lot more difficult to get to the top of the tax curve where the penalty is lifted so neither the curator nor beneficiary loses out. If authors are willing to part with their author rewards instead which are way easier to reach the tax curve as there's more curation happening at the post level than the comment section, this could even the playing field a little.

Another idea that would be cool, but would need to be discussed with @cardboard who's the developer behind @reward.app would be if the rewards would instead be tipped to the comments so when people go back to reading the posts on front-ends like @peakd they could see the tips on the comments (hopefully a feature that will also be added to hive.blog at some point in the future) and at the same time burn some hive by sending a small fee to @null which the tipping feature already does which is also created by @cardboard!

Anyway, interested to hear your thoughts on this. If there's ways this could be abused, if there's some negative actions that could come from this, etc.

Thanks for reading! 

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https://images.hive.blog/0x0/https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/hiddenblade/i2W9CjnS-Acidyo.jpg