as a newbie  om steem it is hard to survive for me

bidbots force us to become investors in our community. Return on investment is maximized when you have investors on one side, worker bees in the middle and the speculating public on the other side.

In our case, we play all three roles simultaneously!

I have stated earlier that if one content creator has to reward another, then it is due to four reasons: quid pro quo, making money, altruism or genuine appreciation.  

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged had a model of innovators working with each other and was the earliest block chain. but in practice it is a hard one to pull off.

the better model is to become outwardly focused. readers on the outside, no bid bots in the middle and creators on the inside. i think SMTs will help in this case if we can get a viable business model going.

this means that in addition to attracting a Medium or Hackernoon, we must also have our own group that will attract mass readership. 

otherwise the law of diminishing returns will take over.

if we still try and persist in making money out of each other then:
it just makes me wonder whether blockchain will solve the problems that we expect it to do. will making transparency a virtue and money an everyday incentive, produce the results? Writing is hard stuff and generally requires skill, perseverance and luck. are we expecting too much of steemit once all the dust has settled down? i know it must have been easier in the beginning but that is always true of any venture. when the gloss has worn off, the enduring value must shine. Just like the moon, will steemit be reduced to a mere reflection of our own base motivations?

Very good my friend 

Posting good 

I like

Lately I've been seeing these arguments a lot too. But since I wasn't around when the curve happened, for now I just kick back and try to imagine how everything was and whether or not going back to the old system would benefit us minnows. 

Well I'm still not sure where I stand but I tend to find those arguments educational and quite entertaining so I'll keep at it. Cheers :)

Except that you make it seem as if:

A) The n^2 curve is what is suggested again, which is not, it's a compromise between that and linear, so N*1.2 or similar, which is to disuse stake splitting and encourage stake concentration in turn.

B) That a change in Curation Rewards is counter productive without a zilch of reasoning behind it and I quote your nonsense assertion: "It sounds good for engagement on the surface, but in reality most of the votes are cast by SteemVoter and various automated voters. "

So for A you discredit it without correct reasoning and saying that it's the same when it's not, and B you seem to think that because someone has the upper hand there is absolutely nothing to do but throw in the towel until "SMT" and communities which won't solve any of this because it doesn't address distribution in the least. 

What I see is your reactive opinion which has little, if any basis to hinge on  least consideration is something from an age long and long ago.

I remember you were the one that said SO WHAT to people self voting, you said SO what to people using their stake to flag without discrimination in the same thread and you're here to comment on what will and won't help and yet I have every reason to believe that you cannot see the clear detriment of supporting/condoning such callousness as wanton flagging because "it's your stake" and euqally self-voting, reasoned with the same short-sighteness, so do you really care about what the proposal aims to accomplish or are you simply offering your opinions, empty, completely devoid actually, of sense?

Also, best you remember that the most powerful display of stake was and will continue to be the whale experiment and HF 17.5, the push you talk about ain't to Stinc, they can fiddle for 3 more years with SMT and communities for all I care, and you can call me crazy when I say this but mark my words, the fork away from Stinc will inevitably come around when moderation will still be absent soon after SMT from the noise of Stinc and with that fork the holdings of Stinc and NED and all others associated with the spinning of wheels will be frozen.

Hey @whatsup, it's the first time I come upon one of your posts, I believe, so I gave you a follow :)

I completely agree with your points.  There are too many upvote bots out there and automated curation systems to justify that change as better for everyone. As someone who has grown organically in the last year, I've seen how it can be so rewarding just to curate and post with human interaction without the use of any bots of that nature. Human curators are different, you tag them and they see valuable content and help people get noticed. Bots and automated curation systems don't see the quality of the content. They don't see the difference between my smoothie post or my videos. Someone who wants to upvote certain posts, by being there humanly and physically, they can select what content to upvote. They have freedom of choice.

One thing I've mentioned before and I'll say again here, I think a better solution would be to increase the amount of upvotes allocated at 100% curation. With only 5 upvotes, a lot of people don't know if they should upvote or not. That being said, I'm the kind of person who just upvotes posts I like at 100% ALL THE TIME and then comments I enjoyed at 25%, typically. I will upvote until I am down to 0% some days, if I am very active, because no matter the value of my upvote, I want those people to know that I upvoted their content because I found value in it. But a lot of people conserve their upvotes, which is understandable. With more upvotes at 100%, and THEN more upvotes per each percentage, people will be more incentivised to give out more upvotes, to curate more, as opposed to being stingy. The solution IMO is *not* to give more of the payout to the curators. That just takes away from content creators, and then who's going to want to keep creating content that has value, other than people like you and me. Most people will resort to spam or just post random pics with no great effort (not talking about photography posts) and just share anything, really, while those who post valuable content will suffer. And once again, the bots will win.

That's my take on it, anyway.

well the intelligent people and developers will find out the right way but i hope its just equal for everyone :)

<p>This post has received a 17.10 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @whatsup.</p>

I wanted to say something but I saw that the my ideas aren't that good. I myself don't understand too much the system but at the same time don't want it to change. But I can say this, too many rules and codes are never good, simplicity in the code is what attract people, it attracted me anyway.

Thanks for sharing your perspective and literally speaking till now i don't know the math behind the payouts but i know i will soon cover it, but i read many posts where people are saying that payout module change can hurt and in my opinion already we are really Unbalanced Economy which is really hard pushed from the beginning and at this moment inclusion of new module when Steem Economy is unbalanced can bring that new tension and as you said possibly this change will help people who have large amount of Steem. And genuinely i don't want to see Steemit with same essence with centralised domination where big will become big and small will become small, and i know investment is most important aspect but it's better that if we think with perspective of whole community. Thanks for sharing this post with us and wishing you an great day. Stay blessed. 🙂

Nice to read about other ideas. Too be honest, I dont know what is best in terms of post rewards curve and curation cut from the post rewards. I do know we have super large issue at hand. One of them is the influence of vote bots on the reward pool and the other one is quality of content.

You wrote:
> I know things are not perfect, but I do believe we are seeing improvements in quality and meaningful engagement, but of course I can only base that on my own perspective.

I curate music related post and go through many posts every single day. At some point, earlier this year, the number of quality post was increasing, but I think we got a lot of new users into our community, therefore logical the absolute numbers of quality posts was increasing. However, what I see now, is very much different: 
- the absolute number of quality posts (music related) seems to reduce (note: I curate those posts with textual elements, the original music published I don't look into that much, so they are not part of my statement here)
- number of copy/paste posts is increasing
- the number of users spamming the system is increasing
- the quality content creators come and most of them go quickly
- good behaving users turn into bad behaving users

All of the above is based on what I see happening in #music and other music related tags.

I don't have the solution, but what I think is we need to start testing. We see current problems already for a long time, but nothing has been done to test solutions. Steemit is still in Beta, which means to me, we shall test, change something and see what happens. Not sure how ling test cycles shall be, maybe 2 to 3 months? We could have already had 2 to 3 test cycles since the last HF.

Added to that: Communities and SMT. We can wait for these the arrive, but when will they arrive? Given the situation we are in, the arrival of these features maybe way to late. Those who are here for the community, to interact, will be able to jump to another community since more and more competitor networks are hitting the market. And soon ONO will be available in international version and running on the EOS network. This network is quite similar to Steemit; Time will tell if ONO can make their promises real; But it will be a strong competitor to Steemit and Steem, I'm pretty sure about that.

I wonder what will happen with bidbots when TRENDING channels are taken away from all the UIs to the Steem blockchain.

As my grandmother would say, "Whatever's clever, my dear."  Then there's, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."  Funny thing is, the corollary does *not* imply, "If it's broke, you must fix it."

It's going to be interesting to see what happens after Hard Fork 20. 

 I didn't like the curvy rewards,  especially because they rely on big whales giving you upvotes and they aren't doing that nowadays.

Every now and then I make a post that does exceptionally well and I'm not sure how I would be affected by that change, but I'm against it at any rate.

 I also think it would encourage the buyers to be even more proactive with the bid bots. That's something that might not be good for the system.

As for curation rewards...... I don't know. As a content creator curation is something that I don't look at very often.

Maybe exponentially reducing the vote value when voting for same person in 24 hrs. That will stop some exploitation. Stop sp delegation and people will start curating manually. Tie voting key with something more critical like transfer to stop vote selling.

Heh, and so the economies of the real world enforce themselves here as well. The powerful get more powerful and the bottom continues to struggle. Ain't no pure system in the world.

>The first change being discussed is to put some of the curve back into the reward pool

So basically, people with the money to pay for loads of voting bots *(who are currently boosting their own posts up to $100)* will get even more benefit at the cost of people trying to be 'fair and honest'.

>Increase Curation Rewards, by giving a larger percentage of the stake to voters instead of posters.

And with this, voting bots will gain an even bigger income, giving everyone even less incentive to do their own work.

Wow, how many bad mistakes can one make?

Resteeming this for more attention.

Get rid of all bots or make bot votes useless. Social network is for humans to interact, not bots.

Yep, well to me there fine as they are. I'm open of course. But seems pretty good right now. Thanks @whatsup for posting and sharing this

Government(SteemIt Inc) over site and regulation is rarely beneficial. 

_**"If you want more users to be rewarded, simply vote for more users.  "**_
This is a better solution, but it takes personal responsibility supported by effort and action without guaranteed results.  It appears to be much easier to complain and clamor for *someone else* to *make it fair*.

nice overview .....and appreciate your view about changes that are gonna happen.thanks to keep updating us

I upvoted. Not because I necessarily agree (I'm in the process of thinking this through more thorougly).

But because the rewards were sitting at $49.95, and my upvote caused the payout to start with a 5, which gave me a feeling of importance and power, temporarily filling the infinitely empty void in my heart with an illusionary feeling of purpose - the hopeless void has been left there by the love I never had as a kid.

Thanks, Steemit.