Congratulations @yintercept!
Your post was mentioned in the [Steemit Hit Parade for newcomers](https://steemit.com/hit-parade/@arcange/daily-hit-parade-for-newcomers-20181107) in the following category:

* Comments - Ranked 4 with 24 comments

I also upvoted your post to increase its reward
If you like my work to promote newcomers and give them more visibility on Steemit, consider to [vote for my witness](https://steemit.com/~witnesses)!

Please read this. You either haven’t seen plenty of points that have already addressed your concerns or you’re just ignoring them. 

https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-david/improved-curation-rewards-are-still-a-necessity

>So the change from 25/75 to 50/50 would have an effect of reducing earnings of small accounts by about 30% and redistribute this income to whales and bots.

This is not true. It would only *initially* reduce rewards for those who rely solely on post rewards for “income.” As behavior and investment habits change, posting rewards could easily increase as a whole due to better incentives for buying and holding STEEM as SP.

My curation rewards are so minimal at the moment i dont put any thought into curation - just upvote content i enjoy. 

Some people say the reason for wanting the change is that there are more content consumers than creators which makes the current system unfair. But it is the content creators who put in the majority of the work so should get the majority of the rewards!

I think that over time changing curation would reduce the quality of content here

.

it is just a move by people with a lot of sp to try to gain more profits. It is another blow into the face of small accounts that make literally all their income from posting and that do not have a meaning-full vote. 

Steem economic system is not that well designed, by giving more power to large holders it is not going to change. But when the big players are in controll, they will vote for changes they like. Lets hope they are smart enough to realise that their success depends on adoption of steem and a 50/50 split is not going to help.

I really don't understand why people think 50/50 would benefit Steemit, it certainly would benefit curators (the ones with large SP) but the authors? Rewards are a finite daily resource, say 80,000 Steem daily (this is just a number, I don't know what the reward pool is), right now authors would get 60,000 with 50/50 they get 40,000 and that's it, curators would jump from 20,000 to 40,000 why would they change their voting habits if all of a sudden they will be getting 100% more for what they are already doing? So yes whales and large stakeholders will benefit, no one else will.

As Steem Pope, I cannot grant my blessing to changes that are transparent attempts to reward whales and bots. Curate to promote quality content, not for profit. In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing curation switch toward a 90%/10% model and a proportionate increase in the number of votes one can make in a day..

I agree. It's funny how so many already curate and paid so little and do it anyways. Meanwhile, we're supposed to "trust" the rich on the platform to actually care to curate if we give them double... lol. Why do't they already care to curate? They already make a lot more than the small fish... yet that isn't "good enough". It's all about the money, not making curation any better. The bots and vote sellers will be the ones that benefit the most. Resteemed the post as it's a good basic down-lo of the issue ;)

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Curation is cheaper and adds more value to the network than posts, it'd make sense that the whales are toying with this idea.

I'm no whale, but I support the 50/50 rewards idea.  (What I would really like to see is for authors to be able to choose their own reward ratio when they submit their posts so each author could use curation rewards to attract an audience and find their own ideal value, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.  I very much doubt if there's a very good *one size fits all* solution.)

> The thought behind this action is that increasing the curation rewards would increase curation activity.

For me, among other things, the thinking is that: (i) Increasing curation rewards would make Steem a more attractive investment, which would bring more people to Steem and increase its value; (ii) It would encourage authors to power-up more of their author rewards instead of dumping them on the market right away, which would also increase Steem's value; (iii) It would boost the ratio of readers-to-authors in order for authors to get more visibility; (iv) At Steem's new, higher value, and with larger audiences, authors would earn more, even though their percentage is lower.

So yes, I agree with your statement that it would increase curation activity, but that's only a small part of it.  I think it would also benefit authors and attract investors.

What do you think should be the number of readers per author?  Forget about rewards for a moment.  Do you think Steem's high quality authors are getting anywhere near the audience size that they deserve?  If you agree with me that authors here deserve much larger audiences than they are currently getting, what effect do you think the 50/50 curation reward would have on the size of each author's audience?

**Update:** FYI, Here is [the best description I've seen of how voting works](https://steempeak.com/steem-help/@biophil/the-ultimate-guide-to-voting-power-with-cartoons-formulas-and-code-references).  That was probably written when the "voting target" was 40 per day instead of the 10 per day that we have now, but the rest should be similar.  When I read it, the part that surprised me was this:

> Surprising news: if you want to maximize your total influence, it doesn't matter how much you vote, as long as you vote more than about 27 times per day. Your total influence is the same whether you vote 1000 times per day or 27. This is because of the constant drip of voting power filling your tank.

I guess we would replace "27" with "7" or "8" today.  

Congratulations @yintercept! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

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To support your work, I also upvoted your post!


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> You can upvote this notification to help all Steemit users. Learn why [here](https://steemit.com/steemitboard/@steemitboard/http-i-cubeupload-com-7ciqeo-png)!

You are absolutely correct, and those agitating for increased curation rewards either know this and promote it disingenuously, or don't and believe curation action is driven by content quality - which it isn't, because of the profit motive.  If it was driven by content quality then plankton that posted high quality posts would not be plankton for long, as curation activity was drawn to their posts.  But curation activity is drawn by profitability, not quality content.  Plankton posts are unlikely to draw votes such that curating them is profitable.

Capital gains has driven investment since time immemorial, and is a suitable mechanism to profit investors.  That mechanism has functioned to drive industry from chipping rocks and making pointy sticks to aircraft carriers and F35 fighters.  It's highly functional, robust, and only flawed insofar as alternative mechanisms to extract profit from production besides sales of products are extant.

Social media platforms aren't driven by content alone, as society is a vastly complex entity, but content quality as determined by users is the product that increases the value of the Steem token - the investment vehicle subject to capital gains.  Curation is an alternative mechanism that allows profit to be extracted before it can increase the value of Steem, which depresses the price of Steem, and harms creators and investors alike.  It is a parasitic siphon of profits that would otherwise fund content creation and capital gains.

We can see from other (non-tokenized) social media that folks will upvote (like) content without any curation reward whatsoever, and dropping curation rewards altogether won't eliminate upvotes, but will eliminate that particular vector for profiteering - which will be good for investors and creators by restoring the financial incentives to create content and invest in Steem for capital gains.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.  Creating content is work.  Being rewarded financially for work is reasonable.  Upvoting content others make isn't work, and curation rewards pretend to be free lunch.  However, they're not free, as the funds extracted via curation decrease the funds paid the workers who make the content.  Worse yet, they extract the increase in value of the Steem token that would create capital gains for investors, decreasing the motivation to invest in Steem.

Gains and profit aren't bad, if they are derived from activity that increases the value of the productive endeavor.  For Steem increasing that value means rewarding content that is popular and upvoted.  Funds that are diverted from rewarding content are diverted from producing that content, and that content also drives the value of the token, so curation rewards also decrease capital gains and harm investors.  Curation is parasitism of capital in the present system, and increasing the extraction of capital via parasitism will harm creators and investors alike.

Thanks!