Personally I think authors should get residual income, otherwise it's bullshit (just my honest opinion). Plus it can be a competition vector to say "hey, we made something like steemit, but we improve on it by also paying residual". I wouldn't leave that door open.

Now, I've gone over the github discussion. Two points

a) RAM issues. I don't understand how it is possible to have a blockchain sitting at 2gb and this requiring ...7gb of ram to handle it. Something is messed up in the software (?) and it should be fixable.

b) Absence of any mention of reward-scaling problem. What I mean by that is that the major hurdle of Steem is how to scale rewards along with the userbase. If we want to have, say, similar rewards to what we currently have, then that means 1000x userbase (70mn) requires 1000x marketcap (200bn USD). Now this is extremely difficult to happen because the explosive userbase growth cannot be shadowed by a similar marketcap increase (in all probability). So what we have instead is, say, a 1000x userbase and a 10-20-50x in marketcap, which effectively slashes the avg reward per person by 100/50/20. This problem is very severe and actually punishes Steemit for becoming successful due to the diminishing rewards. If you then start paying the old content, which as time progresses forward will dwarf the new content, then the payouts for new content would be so tiny that nobody would even bother. So there would have to be some type of percentage allocated (like 10-20-30% for old content) so as not to entirely drain the rewards for new posts. But even at 70-90% of the reward pool allocated for new posts, the problem will be severe if the userbase goes up significantly.

> Does Steemit want to be the Buzzfeed of the Blockchain world, because without residual payouts, that's exactly what will happen!

> The way I see it, the potential for this as a content publishing platform is extremely limited if it's one or two payouts and done.

I agree!

I blog in #academia and #science. Not sure if it is a pure coincidence, I have also decided to relegate my blog not to publish original science and research content here at steemit. The reason being i may be able to get more reward in future elsewhere.
See related post and discussion here https://steemit.com/rant/@coinbitgold/just-want-to-rant some discussion worth looking at

These are fair criticisms coming from a content producer, but there are real technological challenges that need to be properly handled.

We have to acknowledge that there are limitations to the voting payout model. Without setting finite bounds, voting on all historic proposals indefinitely introduces complexity that grows as a hyperbola. It approaches infinity quickly and is not sustainable.

The white paper correctly identifies problems with traditional models of reward as well as experimental models such as tipping. All these models have some limitation, so why not apply them where they are appropriate when another model is not? This is a problem that needs to be solved, and voting is not the only tool at our disposal.

It would be quite easy for Steemit to introduce tipping for posts that have gone beyond the payout period but where users still wish to reward the creator. It's possible now, just awkward.

Similarly, loathe as I am to suggest it, the SteemIt website itself could place ads on the pages of older posts from users who opt in. The revenue could be shared between the creator and the site. The user thus pays with their attention.

I linked your post in what I think would be an effective solution.

https://steemit.com/steem/@demotruk/steem-patrons

Well that may be true for people who write for a living and who have the talent for it. I for one am not a talented writer , I don't really think I could come up with something that could give me residual income and I think most of the people here are in my same position. You are only right if you already have something in the market and it is selling. For  aspiring writers I think this is a great platform, they could make some money, make themselves a name and eventually move on to fame outside of Steemit.

This has been my biggest concern in publishing on Steemit. I'm glad I'm not the only one. The fact that we can't delete content means that we really do only get 12 hours to make it worth it. 

I don't mind if it's a short story here and there that was written for the sole purpose of finding an audience and hopefully making back its editing fees, but I was hoping this might be a place to publish ongoing comic book pages, serialised novels, etc, and the one pay and done model sells the artist incredibly short. 

When I write a novel I hope that it will make me and my family money even after I'm dead. That's one of the single benefits of spending hours and hours and hours pouring your life onto the page. The idea that you're investing in the future, and not just trying to get enough to pay rent for that single month.

So, there are a couple of comments on here  I can't see, one of them mentions the technical challenges, here's a comment on the github post I referenced in the article, perhaps you could address this, again, this is not my comment:


@theoreticalbts Uhm, not buying this part one bit...

    The reason for the 30-day window is to allow old posts to be archived -- get them out of the database. Our memory usage is already getting uncomfortably large; requiring everyone to keep everything back to the beginning of time will be counterproductive.

I call shenanigans because the very principle of a blockchain is that it is able to archive everything starting at the very beginning from whence it came. If the problem is simply indexing it in a database then making it easier to query with less stress on your server, maybe it's time to put some of the massive amounts of reserved capital to good use, and make use a data center like every other major platform of this proposed magnitude. The entire "print" library of congress would fit into 15TB and all of twitter from it's inception would fit into 20TB.

Source : The Library of Congress Article On Digital Preservation

Saying it's a memory issue is simply a cop out and a total attempt to convince the less tech savvy that long term accessible storage is expensive, RAM is out of the question, processors are unattainable, and that renting or maintaining a server rack is an unreasonable expectation. The Steemit blockchain does not store pictures, audio, video or anything that is storage intensive right now. Having personally analyzed the blockchain, as of right now it only stores plain text.

I'm not buying it for one second. If that was truly a real issue, then big data centers couldn't exist because they would simply be too cost prohibitive which they obviously are not. Nice try on using a false scapegoat as a cop-out excuse, but anyone here who has any experience with big data knows that :

    requiring everyone to keep everything back to the beginning of time will be counterproductive.

The above statement simply is not true.

Feeding people BS however, IS counterproductive. I store the entire Steemit blockchain on a flash drive right now. In fact I can fit the entire 2 years worth of the Ethereum blockchain on a flashdrive right along side Steemit's and still have room for plenty of future blocks from both chains.

I'm not buying this excuse for even a nanosecond, and neither will anyone one else with common sense and even a basic understanding of how big data works...

I agree the payout should remain live as long as the content is up. It could be reduced some after a certain period of time, but I don't think the content should lose its value for upvotes after 30 days.

Because the attention span of an average internet user is so short, I can understand why Steemit has been designed this way. There is just much more demand for short lifespan media.

But personally I'd love to see a way to reward also longer lifespan content. My suggestion is to have several different blockchains which have different reward schemes to optimize certain kind of content.

- Fresh content. Twitter-like short messages, memes, breaking news, video streaming. If content is older than 24 hours, very few are interested in it anymore.
- Blog-like content. Essays, opinions, commentary, longer news articles, etc. Stays relevant from a few days to a few months. Almost like Steem is now, but adjusted a little bit on the longer term side.
- Book-like content. Long texts. Stays relevant for years.

But until we get to that point, we just have to admit that Steem can't satisfy everybody's demands at the same time. To get the biggest possible network effect, we need to please the crowd that is easiest to attract. After we have a lot of users thanks to network effect, we can start to explore ways to satisfy the demand of smaller niches.

I've been using Steemit for four days now so I fully understand it :)

I think it is absolutely amazing but agree with you that it is being shaped into an overnight hit contest, and that quality content that deserves to be rewarded for years is not going to be with the current set up. I hope they change that, and make the payouts continue for all up-votes, indefinitely.

That's a good point.
> So perhaps the content itself could be stored in IPFS and the blockchain would simply store an IPFS link instead of the content directly. This would also allow content to be edited and updated long after the 24hrs cutoff while reducing the impact on the blockchain overall.
>willbanks.

Now, the newly mined tokens competition between older & newer articles may drive growth in terms of token value. In such a situation although getting less payouts in terms of quantity, it will worth a lot more.
So the real question is, what will drive value growth? As far as I am concerned the answer is quality content & residual income. Anything else will lead to a demise.
I suggest that developers stop making excuses to apply easy solutions that limit the platform's potential. Not to mention that under normal circumstances they should have made contingency plans before so, in order to avoid this type of unrest among end users.

This is a very important point. I have personally brought it up and a number of other people including @smooth have also discussed it.

I have yet to hear from any of the team such as @dantheman or @ned addressing this.  As someone who creates art myself the current 30 day limit is quite disheartening.

I think for many professional artists and content creators this could be a deal breaker that will put them off posting their work on Steemit.  I am not just talking particularly about big name artists to whom even the largest Steemit payouts will seem like peanuts.

I am talking about those artists and creators who consider their work to be timeless.  I think the vast majority of artists think that way.  The whole attraction of Steemit is monetising content but if that monetisation is so fleeting what is the point.

Some pieces of work can take weeks or months of preparation to create.  It just would not make sense to have to forget about them after 30 days.

It essentially incentivises people to produce cheaper, more rushed work with transient value that will not stand the test of time.  

Since these things are stored permanently on the blockchain it will not reflect well on Steemit if most of the work falls into this category.

Indeed this kind of thing encourages the mercenary posting of plagiarised content since the real artists will likely stay away and the scammers will try to take advantage of that - make some money and run.

It is worth the risk for them and the 30 day issue encourages it.  

Just today I have seen more examples of this kind of plagiarism via newly formed accounts.  Luckily they were caught by community vigilance but that will not catch all of them.

Anyway I hope the team listen and solve this issue.