other ways to actually make it worthwhile for humans to interact in Steem ecosystem rather than just sell votes passively
it could be just the semantics of how I understand this, but that sounds exactly like saying "vote for content the way the community wants you to vote for content"
One of the reasons STEEM has additional value for investors is the possibility of passive income PLUS the potential likelihood of market value increase.
you either have to remove curation rewards for curating, or face the likelihood that some people will game the system for their own best ROI. when you remove curation rewards, whether passive or active, you remove the value for some investors.
The best way for any creator to make SP is to network AND to create quality stuff. I'm not good at networking, but I realize it's still the best way.
Yes, reading your comment made me remember one proposition I really liked actually!
Separate passive investors to their own reward pool so they don't diminish the efforts of active curators! If there are people who only want to maximize their profits from investment, let them, but we shouldn't let that behavior effect everyone else negatively and forcing them to join since there's no other good option. If we do this, there will be more curators, since they can actually affect what the trending looks like. And as our content discovery actually starts working, we'll start getting more members. And as Steem Power will actually have effect after this change, there'll be more demand as well, both for passive investors and active users which will drive the price up. So in my mind this is a win win for everyone, other than those who want to see Steem not succeed in a major way.
@elipowell
Sounds like an SMT backed with an Oracle could be the solution here? That way the post rewards as viewed by the SMT may choose not to include bot votes and self-votes.
Yes, SMT's could try a lot of different schemes, and I'm also interested in making one that focuses solely non promoted ecosystem.