agree

Comments also show up on Trending (since a change a while back). The idea is to show whatever is getting votes (and therefore getting payouts), in part so people can downvote it if the rewards aren't deserved.

Spreading the rewards out among multiple comments can reduce Trending somewhat.

Whether you hold 100k SP or 50SP, the price of STEEM affects your investment. 

Sure those that have invested more, earn more when they price increases but I wouldn’t say that having less of a supply of STEEM (by burning it) helps larger accounts and not smaller.. that’s a weird way to think of it. 

Currently those who have 100SP have an account value of about what.. $20.. maybe? If STEEM was worth $5 again, their account would be worth $500.. I’d say they benefit pretty well. 

I understand how one could think that distributing the inflation to smaller accounts would be better than burning it, but removing it from the supply helps everyone, especially when the demand for it is pretty low right now. As a balance in supply and demand Is key for healthy economics. 

Currently content is way down, and so are active accounts. So one might say that we have too much inflation floating around in the pool for the content we have available. So what’s more beneficial longterm, pass it out and over pay for some of the content here.. perhaps setting bad expectations and maybe even resulting in more STEEM being sold (creating downward pressure on demand and therefore price) or take it out of supply to increase the value of the STEEM we all hold?

I would say content is pretty well rewarded right now, that which I see anyways. Which is refreshing. But I also think that just throwing tokens at people .. for anything and everything... just because they are there, doesn’t help anyone longterm. 

I do think your idea using it as a referral program to attract more users or even keep them etc.. but there is no way to do that from a shared pool. As it’s not like there is just STEEM sitting there that can be transferred to people (as is currently). 

This would have to be done as an initiative or project, sort of how the potato one is doing .. using the rewards from the post to buy SBD. The same could be done to fund a referral program. In fact I think ocd is doing something like this as well. But it couldn’t be done site wide with how the system is currently set up. 

But I do appreciate the rant and the conversation.. talking is good 🙂

Heh, your post on the 'con' side of stock buybacks has a link named "shareholders should be required to vote on share buybacks", _which is exactly what is happening here_! (I believe that link is there because it was the original title of the article, but it wasn't sensational enough or clickbaitish enough for what passes as journalism these days, so editors later changed it to the "ugly truth" one there now.)

> funded with excess cash that the business doesn’t need for innovation or expansion

You may notice that some of the posts which do really well and often outdraw @burnpost are precisely those posts which involve serious and successful development efforts! 

I don't think anyone really disagrees that compelling value-add is better than burning, or even that rewards that attract new users are also great (though we in fact have only a very slow rate of new users at this point), but there are many, many payouts which do not do that and are not (at least subjectively) doing anything but giving away a lot of tokens to repeated milking that the recipients then dump on the market (see any exchange transfer report since ever).

The post doesn’t have anything to do with more STEEM on the system in the slightest. 

The rewards pool is set, and based on inflation. There is a set amount of inflation in the pool for each round of voting (the payout window).. whatever posts happen in that time period split the inflation pool, based on what votes (by stakeholders) were allocated to it. 

The Burn posts simply take their cut of that pool and send it to the null account, which is essentially taking it out of circulation (burning it) as it can never be sold. So, less STEEM that is in circulation, the more scarce it is and therefore more valuable. 

Yes, if no one Is buying STEEM the amount circulating doesn’t matter much.. but supply and demand is a thing, the burn post is simply addressing the supply aspect. 

I’m speaking of the Burnpost (doesn’t have anything to do with SBD). I’m not that familiar with the SPD Potato project other than they are attempting to use the STEEM to buy SBD to help the price.. sort of how you are explaining. They are actually using the rewards to purchase SBD, different than the burn post.

There is no SBD entering the system right now from posts. It was suspended by the blockchain due to there being too much of it. There is some entering though SPS funding, but that stays in the SPS treasury until there are approved proposals. Right now there are a few approved proposals but not that much approved spending overall; most of the SPS funding SBD just stays in the treasury (and off the market).

The @sbdpotato posts are doing exactly what you suggest: buying what is already on the market.

> With only 65k steem you can buy the supply on Bittrex and bring the price to 1 USD.

Such big market buys don't more the price on a sustained basis. They create price spike and then it goes back down.

That would help too. In fact better because no coding required.

I feel like I've seen comments make it to trending before... I could be wrong though.

Comments also will show up in trending unfortunately

>That's not really a great idea. It is contrary to how Steem works to let people unilaterally hide their posts. Every self-voting scammer would use that.

That is true but only a very tiny minority of farm posts ends up in Trending or ever has.

I think the best policy is for those who want to support the burnpost and sbdpotato initiatives is to upvote comments set up for that purpose.

I've been thinking a lot about that issue.  I think trending can be engineered to some extent.  That is, a concerted effort by a group of voters to put exceptional posts there.  No exceptional posts? Well then we've got to start out with ones that are just good.  If there were a couple of these high magnitude composite votes every day on content (steem agnostic content in particular),  I believe over time the quality bar would raise itself, because people could see what is possible, and know if they exceed the effort currently presented, they have a good chance of getting a similar result.  Right now we are failing as a community to set apart the great posts when they come, and from a voting perspective they are indistinguishable from from "the ugliest and dumbest posts on the platform" as you said.  I think that is influencing morale when it comes to effort.

And as I said, what this potato is doing is just creating a long term spike.

Same shit, different time frame.