I support your effort to increase participation by non-English speakers on the steemit platform, but I don't see the utility in 'never finding themselves in a situation where they get zero upvotes for their posts.' Some posts deserve to get zero. This isn't a minimum income situation for disadvantaged citizens; steemit's a platform for earning value when you create value. There is no cost to post, so there is nothing to subsidize.
I don't expect to change your mind, but I hope you will consider the possible effects on the quality of the content that will be produced by the community you hope to encourage. We currently have a major problem on the platform of collusion to upvote content of questionable(lets just say it, bad) quality for the sake of extracting money from steemit. People who make poor quality content are not helping the platform. I cannot speak for anybody else, but my priorities put steemit, the platform, at the top, above any individual or group. If the platform fails, the other efforts at community building will have been pointless.
Steemit failing is a very real possibility. What keeps it afloat is demand for the steem currency and everything else linked to that. If we make it out of the novelty stage, it will be because people want to be here in a community of worthwhile content and people. If people are just putting up shitty posts and quietly siphoning off steem to exchange for dollars, it's just going to be another failed experiment of human greed, another example of why we can't have nice things.
I've gone a bit off the rails here, but I'm hoping I've at least made a little bit of sense. Thank you for adding to the steemit community, and I wish you luck with your endeavors.
Hi, thank you for leaving a well thought comment on this one. I do agree, some posts deserve to get zero. However I do not think it's an issue to give few cents upvotes for lower quality content as long as they are not trying to rip off the auto-upvoting by creating constantly zero value content.
It was a very good point to bring this up and I should make it clear that zero value content creators will be left off from the upvoting list.
The second thing related to the low quality posts is the manual curation. With the possibility of earning higher upvotes with better content, I'm hoping I could attract people to write better quality. The aim of becoming better and improving their earnings with that can start from small things.
I'm usually comparing the payouts of the posts to salary level in different countries. In Finland, I wouldn't assume anyone would go through the work to scam a bot for small upvotes, as the typical low salary job can pay 10€/hour (before taxes). This in dollars is around 13$ per hour.
A typical user would need to create quite many posts with few cent upvotes to gain the same amount of money they would get by using the time working.
Shitposting and Steemit failing are real threats and I admit it. I have no intent of supporting greedy spamming for rewards, but instead I'm hoping this project can lead to more better quality authors posting.
Thank you for your reply. I should have been more clear about my expectation of abuse of your curation method. I do have a biased belief that Finns have higher standards and decency than to scam a few cents posting zero to low quality content, but I think the problem will be with posters who can appear to be Finnish to a voting bot. I am always amazed at the level of cunning when money is involved. And as your account grows, the few cents for a 25% vote will become a larger amount. Anyway, just a few things to consider. No good deed goes unpunished. Plan for it.