I think this is sub-optimal from a technical / cost perspective, and too focused on the burden on the wearables committee. I vote no.
I think we should split the discussion in two/three:
- Burden on the curator, their reward, and number of items to view
- Cost for the submitter
Burden on curator, their reward, and number of items to review
It’s harder to verify that the collection is generated programmatically. This might require some coding skills on top of 3D CAD knowledge. The cost of reviewing items, if they are actually programmatically generated, has diminishing costs to scale. The curator will likely catch any major issues on the first ones: any major problems or incongruousness on the meshes will be spotted right away. The second source of errors will likely be on different “traits” (like CryptoKitties’ color, expressions, etc). After checking most of the different traits, the rest of the items reviewed will probably be just fine, potentially just having issues with a particular combination of two traits that might not work well together. Due to this, I expect diminishing efforts to review multiple items. That is to say, reviewing 2 items will be just a little less effort than 2x the effort of reviewing 1 item, but reviewing 100 items or 101 items will roughly be the same effort.
I propose we ask curators to review 1% of the items, or a number proportional to the amount of traits the programmatic collection has. For example, CryptoPunks have 5 base attributes (ape, male, female, zombie, alien, and 87 attributes (beanie, beard, etc). Curators should review at least one of each of these, and then some combinations. Maybe twice or three times as much, for example: (5+87) x 3 = 276 cryptopunks. The first reviews should be the most time-consuming, but after the first hundred procedural generated models, it’s unlikely the curator will find issues. I agree they should receive compensation related to the number of items they review; the higher cost of the first few items reviewed eventually gets compensated by the ease of review of the later items.
Cost for the submitter
The submitter’s cost doesn’t need to be tied to the reward or effort of the curator.
If we analyze the burden on clients and catalysts to support the feature, whether something is programmatic or not makes no difference. It’s still 10,000 new items, a lot of megabytes on disc, on the network, and on the CPU that everybody will have to download and process in order to see the item.
The fee on wearables is not there to “make creator’s life impossible”, “prevent the platform from being successful”, “go against building a sense of community”, on the contrary. It’s our best effort at striking the right balance between liberty of expression versus scalability, server costs and performance burden on other users.
Please see my previous posts on this subject: