What's holding back the user base is the current log in system.  I have friends and family who are following my blog and now have an account but simply can't log in.  The only people I know logging in successfully are techys.  I don't know the solution for this but [here is a suggestion](https://steemit.com/steemit/@beanz/should-steem-be-reserved-for-the-techy-crypto-heads)

@bendjmiller222 definitely agree with your first statement.   That's generally how I go about reading posts.  I go to the new section of whatever topic I'm interested in and vote on articles I enjoy.  I tend to be one of the first few people upvoting because of that and 98% of the time those posts don't trend and my curation is little, but I rather read stuff I enjoy.   Beneath it all majority of people will cash $$$s though.  Just how society is wired.

> I feel that their should be rewards for people that are early to upvote content that becomes very successful. (This may be in place, but it is not been a concrete fact in my mind). This will keep people checking the new feed instead of only what is trending.

That is exactly how the system operates right now. People who find posts already in trending and then vote for them get little to no curation rewards.

> I don't think the "$ value of a post" should be visible until payout time. Let it be a mystery.

You can't hide that data. It is on a public blockchain. You'll just incentivize someone to make a tool which can display the computation.

But that is still distributing wealth and if the post hit $100 it probably caught the eye of someone who found it helpful and everyone else upvoting is ok by me. It encourages new people especially. It does have its drawbacks, but I like the system as it is now and would be disappointed if it were removed.

That's a great idea. Make the earnings invisible until after one month.

> posts with low readership are disregarded, despite whether 100% of the few people who did read it thought it was a quality piece. Currently 'successful' posts are not a true reflection of quality, and the current system makes it extremely difficult for anyone else to rise up.

Agree there is no economic nor recognition incentive to form communities, rather only to cater to the groupthink.

> I read your post yesterday and actually wrote a post with a possible solution.

Post views can be attacked. A vote which costs nothing can also be attacked. Those are non-solutions.

I think I have a solution which involves not voting, but I am not quite ready yet to present it, as I am still analysing it.

I've also been concerned about good quality posts getting bypassed simply because of vote value and SBD.

I wrote a post about a new feature "The Whale Feed", check it out. Unfortunately not a lot of people saw it, because ironically, without the whale feed, I got missed. :)  [Look at it here](https://steemit.com/steemit/@intelliguy/new-feature-request-the-whale-feed)

@smooth, downvoting won't really discourage gambling for "sure" shots, because otherwise the ROI on curation is mostly not worth anyone's time relative to the SP they have at stake. The only way to entirely remove the gambling groupthink calculation is to radically reduce or eliminate the curation rewards, which is what I would suggest.

As I explained to @bendjmiller222 in a comment on this page, removing the early incentive (in lieu of removing curation rewards) would just cause everyone to vote for the most voted posts after the fact.

Currently the hole system is designed to generate exorbitant payouts.
Instead of downvoting exorbitant payouts, wouldn't it be better design the system so that it does not create these exorbitant payouts?

Right now the curation reward makes no sense at all. It just leads to upvote the same stuff from the same known people.  This then makes the post trending which leads to even more votes. 

## What do we have to change?
I would suggest to drop the curation reward completely. If people understand that its their money they distribute they will take care for what to spent. Another solution would be to limit the curation reward per person per time period. 

Second: Making the payout more linear would also reduce this over pay effect and on top of that would make the system much more simple and easy to understand. On top of that payouts could then be done instantly with every vote. Through steems blockchain transparency Self-voting could be easily detected and accounts flagged.

Third: Using a lottery like display of posts as default display option. The more votes the more chance to be chosen. A comment could also be counted as a vote with the users voting power.

If we implement these three changes the current self made over pay problem would most likely be solved.

Missing a few sure shots isn't going to stop people looking for them.  The problem is there is too much incentive to look for them and ignore anything that from the outside looks like it won't take off...

Does voting on a post and voting on a comment use the same amount of voting power? And are the curation rewards on comments too? I realized that I did not know for sure.

Thank you during this time.
 Now, my Reputation in steemd is displayed as "Reputation 21,630,279,218,817". 
Than the Reputation in Steemd acquaintances, is a high score. However, it is in Steemit "5". 
Why is that? 
The I'll try it has a post not good what?
What's left is the influence of the previous Down Vote?
How do I me?

There are a lot of heated opinions on this. I've read a lot of people say that you shouldn't downvote unless it is a major violation like spamming or threatening someone, etc. Others look at it as you do, and just a different way of assigning value to posts.

One worry I have is retaliation. If I downvote someone's post, then I'm worried that they will start going out of their way to downvote all of mine. It could turn into a downvote war.

> There is often a lot of piling to a relatively small number of posts, I'll agree with that. But the reason is not the curation rewards, it is something else.

People upvote what they think is important. Most people are not often optimizing their curation rewards, including myself.

Our discussion of curation rewards is most for identifying vulnerabilities that can be gamed.

Nevertheless the curation reward incentive (or the misunderstanding of it) is apparently driving the initial stage of the groupthink where those who do try to optimize their curation rewards and frontrun whales try to get in early on voting for blog posts. Then this boosts visibility and thus boosting votes (helping to get the crucial whale attention thus somewhat self-fulfilling) from those who vote on what they think is important.

Also I think much of the groupthink has to do with an inherent groupthink in interests of those who are on the site and have significant voting power. Most of us are coming from affiliation with Bitcoin or in the same household with someone who was into Bitcoin.

People like to show approval.  There should be a LIKE flag and count as well as a vote flag and count.  Steemers need to be educated further to understand the voting mechanism and reward but provided with the means to express approval.  Both voting and approval could feed into the reputation algo.  This may help to stem swarm voting, but does nothing to improve the rate and breadth of steem power distribution.  The whales/dolphins need to gift/seed some stake rather than lend it....though how you accomplish that in a fair way, I don't know.

People not understanding the curation rewards is a very simple UI problem. It would be trivial to add an indicator by the upvote button that gives you information about what sort of reward might be possible for your vote. "Percentage of curation rewards remaining" or something like that. This would help people understand how curation rewards work. Their confusion is understandable for two reasons: 
1. AFAIK the only public resource explaining them is the whitepaper and steem.io, which are both completely wrong; 
2. the actual implementation (with the (B+v)/(s+v) formula) can't be understood without a ton of work reading the code, running simulations, and really getting down into the guts of it.

But what if I just want to give you a reward without expecting anything in return?

**@smooth thanks for taking the time to reply..**

I agree, people wrongly think they can get worthwhile curation rewards from late votes on big posts. But I stand by my assertion that people are *betting* rather than *voting* ("genuine content mining")..

I've written more about it [here..](https://steemit.com/steemit/@condra/the-curation-system-needs-to-incentivise-genuine-content-mining-be-honest-are-you-upvoting-or-betting)

>  If you voted for this post hoping to get curation rewards, you wasted your vote.

Would it not be useful to have two upvoting options? One for rewards and one for "likes"?

There are different desires when I vote on something.

1. I am willing to use my voting power to reward it.
2. I like it and want the poster and everyone else to know.
3. I want to reward and I like it.

If other users understood better about how they are going to get paid for upvoting they would not pile on and inflate a post that doesn't warrant it. And if they had an option of showing their appreciation at least with a "thumbs up", they could feel like they are showing appreciation. Instead, some users are voting for things they like, but don't necessarily want to reward due to having no other fast option of showing their approval for a post.

If people could thumbs up any post they wanted to, the poster and others could at least have some indication that the post in question had some value and maybe is going in the right direction. Currently when a new user makes a post, I think most other users feel that since it will more likely be a wasted vote because it won't be voted on by a whale, they are reluctant to vote. They may like it, but they won't waste their vote on it.

Anyway, there may be good reasons why separate thumbs up and thumbs down button would be counter-productive or take something away from how the system currently rewards, but I can't think of it. 

Any thoughts?

And I liked your comment as well. It was informative and ultimately should help users make better choices.

People want to know that someone took the time to see their post. A simple view counter will let people know there was interest without giving a reward.

> Why invent yet another complicated voting process to game the system when you should just vote on the things you find valuable.

Because as [I explained in great detail](https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/blog-rewards-can-t-be-widely-distributed), straightforward linear weighting can also be gamed to degenerate outcome.

Non-experts commenting on suggested algorithms involving game theory is kind of amusing. I don't mean that as an insult, but I hope you guys realize that if we gave the keys to you, the system would burn down to the ground.

You need to really broaden your analysis when entertaining game theory. The attack vectors come from complex scenarios you would not intuitively think of.