Math of Steem - how much curation does DTube pay out?
It doesn't seem to be very well known that @dtube has its own curation system laying on top of the basic Steem curation system. They take 25% of author rewards as a beneficiary reward and then distribute some percentage of it to voters on DTube posts through transfers from the @dtube-rewards account. As far as I know this isn't documented anywhere, and I had no concept of how much of the beneficiary reward they were redistributing, so I thought I would look quickly, and it would make an easy post for a Sunday.
The first post I looked at was this one by @art.life, which gave up 18.556 STU to its beneficiary reward. Converting that to Steem at the current feed price of $1.55 we get 11.97 Steem, and the curation algorithm paid out 7.276 Steem, or 60.8%.
Then I looked at this post by @dronemania, which gave up 10.8075 STU = 6.972 STEEM to its beneficiary, and paid out 2.289 Steem, or 32.8%.
But wait: @dtube voted both of those posts, and DTube doesn't pay out curation to itself. So I looked for some posts that didn't have DTube votes, and picked out these three:
This post by @rainbowboomx paid out 0.435 STU, 0.281 Steem, and curation paid out .28 Steem, 99.6%.
This post by @snowynight paid out 0.168 STU, 0.108 Steem, and curation paid out 0.099 Steem, 91.1%.
This post by @tonysayers33 paid out 1.864 STU, 1.202 Steem, and curation paid out 1.178 Steem, 97.9%.
All of those numbers are close enough to 100% that the difference could be accounted for by the several iterations of rounding error - Steem in the beneficiary payment, DTube in the curation algorithm, me in the analysis. So I think it's very likely that DTube pays out 100% of their beneficiary rewards to curators, except for those that would have gone to the @dtube account. In any case the percentage is at least in the high 90s.
This means that total curation on dTube posts is in the range of 40%, for those of you looking for higher curation percentages. Even better, the dTube portion pays out in liquid Steem rather than SP.
I still don't know how their curation algorithm works, other than that it's very different from the one operating natively on the blockchain. I might look into that later.
"This means that total curation on dTube posts is in the range of 40%"
To me, this is new information, so thanks for ferreting it out.
The 25% fee looks more reasonable in that light, as it no longer looks like it is vastly more expensive to "dLive," if in fact the extracted value is going into increasing the circulation.
Instinctively, I do prefer the "dTube" brand to the "dLive" brand, because a brand that says "live" but mostly isn't live, isn't communicating optimally.
Your post muddies the waters again in my mind as to which is better to use lol.
I don't think there's any evidence that the added curation reward inspired much in the way of extra votes. That may be largely because most of the community is unaware that it exists at all; a month or so ago someone ran a contest for redfish (which I can't find again now) asking "how can you earn curation rewards twice for the same vote" and no one got it right.
It is an interesting idea and could hint at some ways an SMT may support curators. It still doesn't resolve the beneficiary questions I have (at least most) as this benefits the curators. If this attracts a lot more curators on a post, then maybe it will be worth it for a poster but for a larger account getting organic votes, it would still be very expensive to 'lose' 25%. With so few organic curatating SP in the waters, 25% is very expensive perhaps.
Edit: I m going to add the link to my post the other day in case anyone wants to read what I am talking about.
https://steemit.com/steem/@tarazkp/potential-problems-with-app-beneficiaries
Yeah, I think your questions are entirely legitimate but they require a lot more work to figure out. This was a pretty easy thing to check, so I thought I might as well.
I'm very curious to know whether dTube total curation being in the 40% range is really attracting more voters. There are a lot of people who think raising curation in general would cause more people to vote, but that's already easily available to them.
I think one thing that has to change is the communication (surprise). I am going to write a little post about it now (another surprise) :)
I read somewhere recently that besides the 25% for curators, Dtube takes a comission for using its service, I'm not sure how it works but the person who wrote that article said that if that's the case, maybe is more convenient to upload the videos in youtube and later put the links in a regular steemit post. I don't know, I haven't do the maths involved as you did so if you look into it later I'll be waiting for your conclusions.
I don't believe this is true. I don't use DTube but there's no mechanism for that that I'm aware of. I think they were talking about the same 25%.
Of course if you want to pay that extra curation it's your choice. A DTube post that pays out 25% curation in the blockchain system has a total of 43.75% going to total curation and only 56.25% to the author.
Yes i was talking about the 25% taken from the 75% of the author rewards, so in total is 43.75% in curation. Now I remember the post I read was from tarazkp who just commented here a few minutes ago. I think you wrote recently that you were against the idea of 50% for author and 50% for curators because that could discourage the small acounts to post, I think 43.75% for cutation and 56.25% for authors is colese to that.
I'm definitely against increasing the rewards under the current blockchain curation algorithm, because it is strongly weighted in favor of larger votes and serves to concentrate wealth. DTube's is a little different, though. I think there might be room for a compromise increasing curation rewards under a model that rewards participation over stake.
that's a valid point
I think if someone wanted to make a lot of money, then they could offer a 5% service. Advertise it as such, make sure the people can see the 5% fee they charge. Then they can state on their page, we do not time your video out after 7 days, you may relink the video and post every 7 days without worry.
As far as I know other than the people on steemit, there really is not a rule against reposting your own work. You are violating no rules. So the inability to continue to gain on going rewards from a video or any posting is entirely due to people's fear of the downvote.
A Video Storage/Viewing service that allows repeat posting for rewards, while initially may have a lot of content downvoted, eventually the service would reach haejin levels and people will just give up the down voting. After all no rules were broken, or violated.
So the reality to limited rewards for any post is only the fear of being downvoted, or blacklisted, because there simply are no rules against re-posting.
While the quality of content will often have a temporal component, it is rather arbitrary to limit it to 7 days. This limit is one of the biggest flaws of steem, because it discourages quality content. Services that work around this flaw should be welcomed.
I can understand why steem did something like a seven day payout window. Nowhere does it limit or restrict how often a person can repost the same thing. The only thing that stops people from doing it is fear of reprisal from self appointed content cops on steemit. I do not mind people downvoting for reward disagreement, or plagiarism or any of the reasons the down vote flag has. You can not plagiarize your own content. To the best of my knowledge, it is not in the white paper, the FAQ's, or the blue papers. It is just something people either do not do out of choice or out of fear. Some I am glad to see do repost, and I think the numbers will grow with time. There is always a new audience. I found an Author I like to read stories from, they were first posted in 2016 early 2017. I had to dig for those stories. So I am glad to see when Authors repost their past stories.
But why should one have to repost? I have content here that may need to be corrected or amended or that would provide more value if I edit to provide pointers to other posts. I've also come across content that is old, but that I found very useful. Why should the author not be rewarded for me upvoting that content and me for curating it? It makes little sense and rules that make little sense are unlikely to garner a large user base. Without a large user base, the audience for content is limited and the value of the platform is limited.
I have no idea why they chose a 7 day payout cycle, other than the fact who ever developed it sees it as work done in a work week, and thus they pay weekly. Kind of like a house builder. They get paid by the week, then when the job is done they do not get paid again. Now you bought that house, you do not keep paying the house builder for the house. If you took a loan to buy the house then you have to pay the bank to live there, and the government, if you paid cash, then you just pay the government to live there. But the house builder no longer gets any payment from you for living in the house.
People like getting paid, they did at least understand that, and I can see why they chose a 7 day period. How often should the payouts be done on a post, how much computing power would it take to figure out 7000 post a day, 20,000 comments a day, and possibly 50,000 votes a day (all those numbers are just guesses on my part).
To me the 7 day rule makes sense, it is a common pay day thing. Yes Steemit is an uncommon thing but people still want to be paid.
This seems to be how @dsound works. I remember seeing a thing where they encourage reposting, though I can't find it now.
You got a 31.39% upvote from @ocdb courtesy of @tcpolymath!
Thanks for your informative most about dtube.
I've tried to use DTube, but I find it very flakey. The last time I uploaded a video it took about an hour (for a 3 minute video) then once I tried to finalize the post, it told me I needed to upload a video and, suddenly, the video that I waited an hour for was gone. That has never happened to me on YouTube.
Thanks for the mention @tcpolymath! I only wish I had a few more people watch the cool drone videos I posted. Hahaha. Such an tiny reward for the hours it took, but such is the life of a nanoplankon! Feel free to check out my new post if drone videos are your cup of tea....
Thanks again for the cool post and wow you are up to $88! That is amazing!
PS. Do you have any idea how I can get "dtube" interested in my posts? Is it because I am too much a newbie? Hahaha... Thanks!
Too bad D.Tube hardly ever works. Makes it hard to curate honestly if you can't even look at the content.
I had that same problem until three weeks or so ago and now it almost always works for me. Maybe there's some hope that they're working the bugs out.
Ooh. I've been poking around this just recently just to see what's happening. I found this post: https://steemit.com/dtube/@dtube/curation-and-economic-update
which confirms what you are saying. Moreover, it is saying that the beneficiary amounts are distributed in proportion to the rshares of the curator. No sqrt penalty, just direct deal. Pretty interesting result, so the overall effective curation seems to blend some early-voting bonus with linear staking curation.