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And you believe Kevin and Traf have MORE to lose if their intentions are "not good" and these proposed changes bring forth behaviors that will make Steem more worthless?

This change wont bring any change of behavior. It will change the way the behavior is exhibited but it will stay the same. As it did always.
This change is incredibly dangerous because its essentially a aggressive move by the curator whales against the community in an attempt to grab more power for themselves which they can do, because "curation" has always been seen as a major strength of the platform and the 5-10$ they drop on your post has a huge impact on an individual. (wow someone gave me 10$ for something i wrote) Therefor you assume these guys can do no wrong.

Problem is that we moved away from the "gift" economy which is a extremely small part of the larger picture.

Not one thing that is written in this post can you hang your hat on and say: Yes this change will lead to improvement in this "area".

Not one thing would change for the better, unless you are a curator large account like Kevins and Trafs, then you would get a higher ROI.
Instead of creating a fairer distribution across the board, creating a middle class, they want to empower themselves to a higher degree.

They are essentially saying that by increasing their returns you will be better off.
That is wrong on so many levels.

  1. Passive investors will remain passive investors since not everyone cares about curation.
  2. The "potential" (and i mean this in the broadest of definitions) for new whale curators popping up from what we have now is close to zero, and the passive whale accounts actually openly admitted they would still look for passive income instead of curating.
  3. And the most important part... There just isnt enough curators to assume they would be able to cover current platform quality creators with upvotes, to justify a cut of 25% from author earnings for everyone on the platform, alienating passive investors and a move to 1.2 superlinear
    Curator behavior would not change and everyone else would take a huge cut.

You would be essentially increasing community dependency greatly on just a few large stake holders that already have a great effect on the gift economy.
This is ludicrous on so many levels.

Problem is that we moved away from the "gift" economy

Steem was never envisioned as a gift economy. It was and is based on directing rewards to those who contribute value.

Gifting can be done using the transfer function. That's not ever been the idea of the reward pool and voting.

Though I will say it wouldn't necessarily be an altogether bad idea to design a system around. But it isn't Steem.

move to 1.2 superlinear

Kevin and Traf like ^1.3 or ^1.2 superlinear (which they call 'mild' but I disagree) but very few others do. It isn't likely to happen, so perhaps consider the rest of the proposal without it as a more realistic take.

I might have expressed myself wrongly there, but STEEM being a "gift economy" is the idea being held by quite a few people which was the point i was trying to make.
The whole problem around all and any discussions that take this direction, i think stems from one single thing..

Value.

People have a different view of what value is.
On one side you have people trying to tell you what should and should not be considered value, what should be considered more or less valuable, and on the other hand you have people (and i consider myself in that camp) that say: "What ever you decide."

Well if they contribute good content AND make money, I don't mind. If they're making money at the net expense of Steem, that's bad.