@anonymint recently made a post asking <a href ="https://steemit.com/steemit/@anonymint/improving-steem-s-rankings-to-cater-to-diverse-content-preferences#@lightnovelist/re-anonymint-improving-steem-s-rankings-to-cater-to-diverse-content-preferences-20160718t090025479z">Would Steem fail if every blog post of a lady putting on her makeup is rewarded $26,000?</a>

In his post, he covered one of the consequences that result in the way curation currently works, namely that there is not enough diversification in content type in successful posts.

But there is another problem that result from the current ranking and reward algorithms: 

With the way the current algorithms work, the best strategy for curators is to simply follow the most popular posters, and vote on their posts as soon as they appear, hoping to get there before everyone else does. Since these posts are almost guaranteed to become successful, they reap the rewards. 

There is very little incentive to find new, unknown posters who may have very good content, but may not become successful because no one knows about them. Why take the risk when you know there will be 100% successful posts? Especially when it takes a lot more effort to find high-quality content from unknown posters. 

<b>Curators are not rewarded, but penalized for taking "risks" voting for relatively unknown content creators.</b>

This isn't the way curation should work. The purpose of curation is to allow discovery of great content that would otherwise be left undiscovered. A top poster who consistently makes the top trends do not need to be discovered. 

This is why I believe we need to take into consideration of another factor in calculation curation rewards: how established the poster is. If the last 10 posts of the poster all netted over $1000, you can expect that the next post will probably be quite good as well. Thus, there is much less of a benefit to the overall community for curating established posters. 

Curators should be rewarded for putting in the work to discover new content. On the other hand, established posters shouldn't be penalized for consistently creating high quality content, either.

I'm not sure if there are more recent changes, but this <a href="https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/overhaul-of-curation-rewards">seems to be the way posting and curation rewards currently work</a>. According to that, 

_"Steem currently allocates 2 STEEM every block toward content + curation rewards, after these change the 2 STEEM will be divided like so:_

_60% to author of post_
_25% to comments (at all levels) on original posts_
_15% activity rewards"_

My proposal is that we create a new variable *E*, denoting how established the poster is on a scale of 1 - 2, with 1 being completely unknown, and 2 being an extremely established poster (exact definitions to be determined). 

The actual values for content + curation rewards would be calculated thus:

0.4 * *E* = rewards for the author of the post
0.625 * (1 - 0.4 * *E* ) = rewards for comments
0.375 * (1 - 0.4 * *E* ) = rewards for activity

In this way, we can give weight to how much value the curation actually provided. Established posters will be able to get a bigger share of the pie, because even without the curation, they would still be near the top. There is also more incentive for curators to discover content from posters who have yet to establish themselves, and for the new posters, they get the benefit of being discovered. It's win-win-win. 


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