The entire economics here is badly misaligned.
The combination of linear rewards curve, low curation rewards and expensive out of pocket downvotes means the economy has reached an equilibrium where voting rewards a now used and accepted as staking rewards. So this means any genuine vote you give to someone else is basically an out of pocket donation under the current failed economic system.
This in turn results in content agnostic rewards and exposure, which would spell the death of any social media platform. Content is no longer being appraised and rewarded in accordance to one's subjective opinion of its appeal. It's a race to the bottom to either write your own bs and upvote it or write some bs that's just not shit enough to get downvoted and pump it using bidbots.
I've tried a number of times to raise this before, but a combination of compromised witnesses already heavily positioned to exploit a flawed economic system, perhaps deliberate sabotage and plain old stupidity has prevented any of these concerns from being addressed.
Only possible way is if steemit inc understood the importance of fixing the economy and dictated the witnesses themselves. But I doubt it'll happen. Short of that hopefully someone can see the potential of this system and offer to buy Steemit inc out.
The solution is simple, of all the people I've told it too, only Kevin Wong seems to be on board. Indeed, I'm usually the person he's quoting, including in his comment above.
You increase curation rewards to 50/50 to close the gap between bid botting and curation.
That's probably not quite enough to change the status quo, so you also need to hand out a small amount of free downvotes. Roughly 2 downvotes daily vs 10 upvotes will likely suffice. That way, there is at least a viable threat to upvoting garbage content as the ones that stand out will more than likely be hammered down now that there's no cost to doing so within limits. This will further push the balance towards actually curating content that you think is appealing in terms of rewards.
Finally, you can't downvote what you can't detect. If someone splits their self voting up into thousands of different account, the cost to hunting them down is too high. Therefore, a small level of superlinear is necessary. Even something as simple as half rewards up until around 5 steem, then linear after that will do. That way, you might as well curate properly than spam micro votes as you're only getting half the rewards under a certain threshold. After that, it'll be much easier to detect and downvote with their limited free downvotes.
Increasing curation, allowing free downvotes, and having superlinear all have downsides. This is why excessive measures such as 90% curation, as much free downvotes as upvotes, and n^2 are bad ideas. The minimum amount of these measures should be used in tandem. Together, they compliment each other to plug all the leaks in this sinking ship at the lowest.
With the current economics, the platform is completely self defeating.
I've been with you and Kevin from the start, I've even took the effort of creating https://steemliber.herokuapp.com/index.html - a new frontend that filters botted posts but haven't had the time to finish it.
I also voiced my opinion loudly for some time until I just decided to give up and join the crowd. Now after selling 100% of my votes for months now, I wonder is this how @ned wants his product to work? Manually voting someone from my own feed feels like I'm wasting my voting power, you're so right about that.
The reason I invested into Steem in the first place was the proof-of-brain aspect. Bots killed what was left of it instantly.
Ugh, this again. 50/50 is a tragically bad idea. Ive written about this in detail months ago so i wont be going in detail now. This would do nothing to vote selling. The vote selling services would just readjust the prices.
The superior solution is cutting author rewards once the DAO launches. That would go a long way to fixing the bot problem.
I know you and Kevin want to make more money but i think the bigger problem is that youre seeing vote sellers make more then you.
If vote sellers didnt make as much im pretty sure you guys wouldnt be advocating for 50/50.
Why can't negative curation work just like positive curation?
Both have equal value.
Why are we punished for negatively voting abuse?
Oh, that's right, the abusers control the code, silly me.
True story.
This token economy is partially broken by too much Greed.
Like you said,
Some of witnesses are already running bidbots and making profit out of it. So as Steemit inc, I assume.
Seems like this is unstoppable.
Why? Because..
So.. If,
Well well..
What we gonna drink when the pool is dried out??
We need some enlightenment here.
I support your idea, @trafalgar.
50/50 Reward distribution would be a good head start.
Good points.
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might look at your account and untick /tick some witnesses
He’s too busy “ticking” his gifs and alt accounts on the 6th day....
sounds like what i should start doing:) left a comment on your steem vision blog
At this point all i need to know is stinc's position, so i can vote the opposite.
Bring back the n2 and the whale experiment at 500mv, imo.