@kevinwong and @whatsup have recently both joined the everlasting conversation of *What should Steemit be?* Do we need a curve? Do we need more curation rewards?

How to align the economics of Steemit and profit maximization with the *beautiful idea* of the best content being rewarded?

And how do we judge which content is best?

You know, all that good stuff.

So, currently. The people with the largest stake don't really care about the possible hard work, sweat, and tears you put into your content. It is simply not in the best interests for a stakeholder to really bother with "curation". The best way to make money right now is just to delegate to a bid bot and letting one's stake work for him.

And can a person really be judged for wanting to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort? Not really, seeing as how that's what we all would do, should the opportunity present itself.

I've personally been a proponent of higher curation rewards for a long time. The logic being that higher curation rewards would combat the bid bots, making it economically viable for greedy whales to actually bother with manual curation. No one does anything around here out of the goodness of their heart, save for a very rare and special few.

I also think linear rewards are flawed, and the transition to those saw Steemit riddled with a ton of spam that wasn't there pre-hardfork.

 However.

Let's say we put the curve back, and also changed the model to 50% or even 75% curation rewards.

The drive still isn't there for a single whale to *"look for good content and upvoting based on what he or she likes"*. Why? Because, again, that's not efficient. That takes work, it takes effort.

The end result would be that certain popular kids would get put on autovote simply because it's *predictable* that those people get the most votes, resulting in the highest curation rewards.

It's a neverending cycle that feeds itself: a poster gets votes because he gets votes - Whale A votes for a poster, Whale B notices this and sneaks in a vote himself, predicting that someone else will do the same as they both know one whale vote attracts more of them. This then repeats several times, and a *Trending Page Regular* is thus born.

He is now on autovote, making $500 every time he posts anything, and the people giving him the largest votes probably don't even use the site for anything other than maybe cashing out the profits once a week.

Is it necessarily worse than the model we have now? Well, that's up to you. And granted, I could be in the group of people this would benefit as it would still leave *some* room for the content itself being what matters in terms of the initial popularity and success that leads to said golden autovote spot.

I did it once before, after all.

But it's very likely things would stay the same as the relationships behind the scene on Steemit have pretty much been made already.

I'm just saying it would still not be "fair" in the way most smaller users would hope for it to be.

# But what people really seem to be missing here a lot is the fact that none of this matters anywhere near as much as they think. #

The price of STEEM is often used as an argument for or against certain changes in the economics and whatever the fuck not.

This would help the price of STEEM. This would hurt the price of STEEM. We need to do this or not do that because of the price of STEEM.

And ideally, the laws of economics would self-govern and moderate Steemit since the whales would have an incentive to work on the betterment of Steemit consistently.

I've just never felt like that's the reality of things.

Did the pump last year have anything to do with who was trending?

If we now, collectively, voted the exact same authors to trending that we did last year at this time, would the STEEM price pump?

Sadly, no. At least I don't think so.

This leads to a reality that I've been thinking of for a really long time:

*A lack of skin in the game.*

The STEEM price is controlled by Korean whales who in all likelihood don't even know what Steemit is. I'm convinced they just pumped random coins last year. Kinda like throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks.

Most - probably all - of the Steemit whales have significant stakes in other coins. STEEM is probably just thrash money that they can make for free for no effort. There's zero reason to really care about STEEM for them. If it pumps, it pumps. If it sinks, it sinks. Whatever.

I'm sure most have already made all the money they need out of it anyway.

So, this dream that we all have that if we just upvote and support the right content creators, and the best content, the price of STEEM will surge, justice will prevail, and happiness lasts forevermore - is just that, it's a dream.

I'm afraid.

That's just how I see it, though. Feel free to disagree. And do discuss and raise points if you're so inclined.

And this isn't to say that I wouldn't much, much, much prefer a Steemit where the actual content mattered at least to some damn degree. I really would.

I just don't really see a reason to believe in such a Steemit with human behaviour being what it is.

People respond to incentives. Always have, always will. And there's zero incentive for anyone to do anything differently around here.

Could one be invented, though?

Let me know.