Bitlanders adopted a new policy of returning gems after the submission for review, with the number of gems returned depending on your score.
See Bitlanders Gem Return Policy
At first blush, this seems like a good thing. Why? If you get submit a five star article, all ten of your gems are returned to you. Also, the cost to submit no longer escalates with each submission, but remains at ten. This means Bitlanders has reduced a fundamentally unfair penalty in favor of submitting nonsensical content (such as straight buzz trades), and against submitting top notch content. You basically had to pay in order to do the right thing.
The policy also was bad because it decreased the amount of good content on the site.
However, the policy still retains the nasty feature of requiring payment of gems up front in order to accept quality content for review. If you get less than a five star rating, the return equals one gem for each star, so you will still ending up having paid most of the ten gems. At the time you submit, you cannot be sure how much the submission will cost because you do not know the outcome of the review.
The problem with the new policy is that it costs most of the members bitcoin. The policy favors those in the top tier who have already submitted five star articles, know how to do it, and no longer have to deal with the additional cost of doing so. Naturally, these people will increase more articles, and earn more bitcoin. Since the overall pool of bitcoin available seems to remain more or less constant, the daily payouts to other Bitlanders will go down.
In post blogs, I pointed out the counterproductive nature of the previous policy. Now that the policy has changed, I continue to point out out the counterproductive nature of the policy. The problem was not only punishing people for doing the right thing. The problem was, and is, that Bitlanders charges people for doing the things that make them money, when they should be providing a fair share.
Charging member any amount, and even for a short time, for the privilege of submitting content is exploitative. The members mostly do not have much money, they provide a valuable service, but it should not entail any up front cost, or risk. The submission quality material self limits by the time it takes to produce. If Bitlanders wants to further limit, Bitlander could provide additional explicit content guidelines, such as when it has feature contest. Bitlanders policy of charging to submit articles which have required extensive preparation and work is socially irresponsible.
I think that the problem is that Bitlanders has had this policy from the start, and apparently depends on the revenue. I know if I go to the shop, I see only two products: avatar accessories, and gems. The value of gems is targeted to very narrow purposes. In other words, Bitlanders need to charge members to make Bitlanders site look better results from a failure in creativity. Come on Bitlanders. You can do better! For goodness sakes... sell some T-Shirts or something!
