I've read through nearly 50 comments on this post from a diverse set of users ranging from people who perpetuate vote-selling, to old school steemians who've been pissed at how steems economic system has incentivised this leach of value for a long time. It's undoubtedly a complex issues. I've only been around 20 months, but I've observed a few home truths.
The way things are incentivised on steem works to drive away the people you want to encourage to stay to fulfill steems original value proposition. Good content creators are driven away by vote selling and whale circle jerks. It's that simple. I can only speak from my perspective but I've been writing less and less high level content on steem because it's simply not worth my time! It's very important to understand that this statement is not me self agrandising; the only way to encourage all those bloggers using WordPress, YouTubers and serious freelance writers from places like medium onto steem, is to have a platform that consitently rewards based on quality. Tbh, if we could achieve that the influx of users would be immense and maybe some larger incentive to power up steem might be needed.... Oh wait a minute.... Higher curation rewards might provide that incentive!?
The price of steem increases with the demand and how will that happen with no new content creators? At the moment they're either leaving, or if they can stomach the insulating levels of payout on posts, then they're cashing everything out as they have no confidence in the system! Apart from ideots like me who've powered up nearly everything earned and even bought some steem. Or, they give in and buy votes, or start putting less effort into posts. This issue with trending, bidbots and vote buying is literally creating negative marketing for the whole ecosystem. Short term gain to a few people at the cost of many people and the overall price and perception of steem currency/Blockchain.
I'm in favour of these proposals... If they can be shown to make manual curation return better ROI than delegating to bidbots. This is not about my dissatisfaction with my steem journey at this point, but rather saving the original USP of steem and the only thing which might restore faith and bring huge numbers of new users in the case of a potential bull run this year. It is now or never with this. There are far too many people raping this economy for short term gains and as @trafalgar pointed out... the best we can hope for is to try and incentivise good behaviour before steem disappears further up it's own ass.
Ok, I'm paraphrasing a little 🤣😉
But, seriously! something needs to change before EOS brings out it's own crypto socmedia/content platform or steem will be in big trouble, despite being the first mover of a decentralised proof of brain social platform.