Ask your self will any of these changes stop you from self voting every now and then just to lower your vote power and have it earn a little bit of steem for you?
You got one affirmative answer in this post, at least on paper. Though it was a 'maybe'.
And nobody is saying it's going to change everything. But the new rules are wired so that they get more if they do more (rather than just being lazy). So there's at least an incentive to shift. That actually goes for bid bots as well.
I guess when it is all said and done then we will know the outcome. Then people can find the next thing to change so they can move on and put it all behind or on the back burner. I still re-call all the talk about RC's how that was going to Allow everyone to create free accounts to onboard their friends and family, how it was going to control spam content on the steem blockchain, how it would improve content quality and provide things for manual curation. It did not happen how envisioned or at least how it was presented to the people, and I do not see this helping the general user, nor improving content, nor improving curation. I fail to see how this will fix anything other than allowing for the pis-ant flag accounts to flag 25% more often since it will be a free 25%. So instead of 100 flags they will be able to do 125 flags, or more.
I have read all the post put out by steemitblog, not one of them has left me with a clear understanding of what the problem is and what they are trying to fix.
There are two flag issue's one-abusive flagging of individuals and specific types of content. - - two - not enough flagging for excessive rewards.
Curation - post get voted in the first hour or two then curation efforts are over because there is no incentive to curate after the fact. a 50/50 split is not going to fix that.
I would love to see what would happen to a post, any random post, that a whale felt like giving a 100% upvote on because they liked it. When looking at the votes from vote trails most of them are in the single digit or less percentage wise and it makes no difference as to how much Steem Power the account hold. Those with 60 SP vote at 1% as often as those with 100,000 SP vote at 1%.
I honestly do not see how a single one of the proposals are going to help the steem economic situation or the social situation on the blockchain.
Well, you mentioned point (2) on flagging for excessive rewards, and that's the main upside, as mentioned here.
Regarding curation, you are quite wrong about that, and in fact I feel this is something that more people should be aware of. You get back 1/8th of your value even if you vote last (and the curation curve is designed for preserving a minimum incentive to curate). Of course, you can say that's a garbage amount, but it's quite crucial, because as you say, a lot of people are under the impression that after the votes are done there's no reason to vote on top. And that's just not true.
But right, that's not relevant to 50/50 at all. What it is relevant to is that it gives more motivation than before to curate vs self vote. Obviously some people will prefer to be lazy, but the way things are designed, curating really gets quite a boost (especially with the curve).
That is a point that I and no doubt most others miss about the curation reward system, otherwise there would be more individuals like me that vote when we see, read, or enjoy the post regardless of when the post was made if it is in the seven day window. Most post never receive secondary votes after 36 hours of being posted.