Are Rewards A Bit Too Conspicious On Steem Frontends?

A pretty picture to cheer you up

Part of the marketing strategy of Steemit from the start has been to show the dollar values of posts clearly below them. Monetization is possible for content creators on all mainstream platforms but the rewards are hidden from public view. It probably hasn't even occurred to any UI designers to suggest that the rewards be shown publicly.

Financial privacy in general is the norm in almost any society and I don't see any reason for Steem front ends to go out of their way to buck that trend by making a spectacle of the rewards awarded for a post. Of course, all transactions on Steem are visible to the whole world - with the right tools, of course. What I'm not suggesting is not that the protocol should be changed to use zero-knowledge-proofs to obfuscate everything. It is very important that all financial transactions on Steem be auditable for the purposes of guarding against reward pool abuse.

That said, I don't think it's necessarily a good idea for the front ends to make it impossible to read a post without being aware of the rewards it has earned. That's because envy of higher earning Steemians is a tremendous source of discord on the platform. What I've seen on various platforms outside Steem where Steem is discussed is that people who have used Steem sometimes take part in the discussions trashing Steem, motivated by negative feelings caused by income disparities and perceived injustice. That's not necessarily good publicity.

One of the reasons I like SteemPeak is that it doesn't use the dollar symbol below a post when it shows the rewards. It's explicit about using units other than the dollar (Steem Token Units), which is what all the other front ends actually show which a figure that may deviate quite a bit from the dollar value of the rewards. The discrepancy is caused by the difference between the internal and the external prices of STEEM. Externally, STEEM is priced in USD while internally it is priced in SBD. Because the price of SBD may be lower or higher than one USD, the difference can be quite large. At present, SBD is priced at 70 cents, the actual dollar value of the post values show by Steem front ends must be multiplied by 0.7 to get the dollar value. When the price of SBD was between 14 and 2 dollars between December 2017 and May 2018, the dollar value of posts was much higher than what the front ends showed. I think a front end shouldn't necessarily even show the rewards but if it did, showing the raw token amounts would be better than to show an STU value pretending its the actual dollar value when could be significantly off.