If you have watched the most recent LEO Roundtable, you might have already caught the news, although it was only mentioned in a brief explanation: Leofinance is going to get rid of the 7-Day Reward Cycle imposed on us by Hive! In this article, I'm going to talk you through how the reward cycle is working right now, what issues that implementation has and why I think it's high time to fix it, and finally detail how the guys are planning to implement the new system.
Currently, the reward cycle works as follows: You have a 7 day window to vote on any content released on Leofinance. Once that time is up, the author and curation rewards are distributed and voting is closed on the article. Afterwards, you can obviously still access the article, but you can no longer cast your vote on it. This is mostly a legacy from the way Hive operates.
Because Hive doesn't have a linear curation curve, it's important to have a fixed ending time for voting. The rewards payed out are greatly influenced by the time you did cast your vote. The more votes came after your vote, the bigger your share of the rewards will be. Thankfully, this system is no longer used on Leofinance. Here, you always get the same share of the rewards, no matter if you were the first or the last to vote on an article. Because of that, having a certain payout time would not really be necessary for Leofinance, but since it's hard coded for Hive, it has not been changed for Leofinance, so far.
The way payouts are handled has a very distinct negative impact for authors - you can't receive any more rewards for your work after the 7 days have passed. For a lot of articles, this won't really be an issue, many articles don't receive any more votes after the first 1-2 days anyway. But that's not true for all articles. Some of my older articles on Publish0x still fetch some views every day even though they were released half a year ago. Just do a Google Search for Emergents CCG as an example.
One of the major goals for Leofinance right now is growth. One way to achieve growth is through SEO (you can learn a lot more on that in the Roundtable) and that's where the current reward cycle really becomes problematic. If we want to incentivise our authors to optimize their articles so they rank higher in Google, we'll have to make sure to reward them accordingly, no matter if it's the day the article is released or 6 months later.
This might very well totally change the way some authors look at Leofinance. Instead of doing articles that are highly relevant for a short time it would now be an awesome idea to have some core articles that you iterate on. You could have a core article that explains the basics of blockchain technology and every new article you do on that topic always references the old article. This way, we'd both see more articles with a greater scope on the platform and at the same time give our authors another avenue for long term passive earning from their work. Personally, I think that's a great idea and luckily, the guys from @leofinance seem to agree.
Since the reward cycle is hard coded for Hive, there sadly is no easy way around it, but there's already a clever solution to that. Keep in mind that this has only been explained in short in the aforementioned video, so the implementation may yet be changed nor not implemented at all. It goes like that:
After 7 days, the usual payout occurs as always, everybody receives their rewards and the reward cycle is closed. You can still vote on the article like you were used to, though. When you do, Leofinance will create a new comment on the article, set the beneficiary to the author of the article, and vote the article with your selected voting power. Ideally, the comment wouldn't even be shown so we don't see dozens or even hundreds of empty comments on top articles, but I'm sure they already thought of that as well.
I think this implementation is pretty clever and easy to use. To a curator, it would simply look as if he had voted on the article, so you simply wouldn't have to worry about the 7 day curation cycle any longer. This will obviously only work for the LEO payouts, though. Ff you vote with Hive powered up as well, you'd just waste your vote here. So that's one more reason to set up a dedicated Leofinance account in case you have not done so yet.
All in all, I'm really impressed with what the Leofinance team is accomplishing here. All the little things I did not like about Hive are getting eliminated one by one and we are heading towards a bright future here. In a mere 3 months, Leofinance has changed from a tag we add to gain some additional rewards to the front page of the (blockchain-)internet for many of us!
That's all from me today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!
