I saw some push-back on the post about limiting the weekly reward pool payout to .6 XMR, and wanted to post why I think that limit makes sense.
Having incentives for all of the actors involved on the site is important to keep the site thriving, and the reward system is a great way to keep 'curators' upvoting to promote quality content, which is one of the biggest selling points of the platform imo. (I hope we're all in agreement there)
That being said, I think it makes more sense to spread the payouts over as much time as is economically viable to keep the community consistently active, because if they payouts are lumpy, so might be the activity, which might cause people to leave.
If you look at the reward pool in the weeks leading to the past week, you can see that they were hardly enough to keep people upvoting the posts and comments that they liked, but .6 XMR seems like way more than enough to support the current level of activity, and already seems much higher than the amount that is being tipped weekly.
If the activity on the platform becomes sufficient such that more than .6 XMR is being added into the reward pool weekly, then it would make some sense to revisit the limit, but I think having a "runway" right now is great incentive while the platform is in its infancy for people to keep coming back. It would be a shame for such a great idea to run out of steam early.
I know I will be upvoting this week :)
Thanks for chiming in. The more I think about it, the more I'm thinking it should be even lower. 0.6 XMR is over $300 now. and the Monero price keeps rising steadily. The curator rewards aren't meant to "get your blood pumping". Its an incentive for participation, not a paycheck that is owed to anyone. Past a certain weekly amount, it could become a detraction and make people focus on the wrong thing. They will focus on the optimizing to receive a reward, rather than organic participation and upvoting things because they actually like or agree with the content.
The donations to the pool were an incredible gift that should sustain and help the platform grow so that it can start accumulating its own rewards organically instead of through large infrequent donations. The point is not to distribute everything as quickly as possible and then leave people disappointed when it runs out. That leads to speculative degenerate behavior, and short term users who just show up opportunistically.
Not to mention that most users don't fully grasp how the rewards are allocated. 50%+ of the pool goes to the few users who do understand it. Stasher News is nowhere near the adoption levels needed to warrant $300 weekly payments. We barely even have 300 users.
I am strongly considering using my veto powers and just setting it to the amount I determine is sufficient and just endure any backlash that comes from it. My one job is to ensure the platform survives.
I am 100% in agreement with this. I'm pretty sure that my reputation as the person who advocates for stability over volatility precedes me. When those generous people donated to the pool, they gave the platform the right to decide how best to distribute the rewards to improve the platform and that's exactly what capping the reward does as it creates stability over a longer amount of time where people can engage with the platform.
I would definitely support lowering the limit a bit further if you made that decision, but the .6 current limit does ensure the rewards are sustained for a good while, so I think it makes sense there too.
Lowering it to .5 would be a nice round number, and would extend the donation's effect for a couple more weeks, so if i could vote for any amount, I think I'd vote for that for now.
Regardless, I have been greatly enjoying spending time on here, I am left feeling much better than doomscrolling anywhere else, so whatever keeps this going, I support.
I agree the weekly reward should be a perk for adding value to the space not a game people try to exploit and profit from.
The whole idea of Stasher is to be different from regular social media where users exploit the worst elements of human psychology and attention for high engagement profit generation.
The payout is too high and is attracting the wrong sort of person and building the wrong culture. The value and volume of users is not here for people to be receiving +$50 payouts a week.
Gradually introducing more people in the weekly pool and levelling out the split would be helpful as the site grows.