When I've been building curation bots I don't vote on new posters. Why would I? It's much easier to predict the value of votes going to established posters.
Yes but also much more crowded.
I ran major curation efforts early on. Our biggest wins (hundreds of STEEM of curation rewards) were literally new posters like neilstrauss and others like that. They were lightly voted or unvoted for hours because everyone was fighting over a few STEEM curating stellabelle or dan.
Curation is very, very underdeveloped because there isn't enough money in it, and it isn't seen as effective. Both issues are addressed here. Like you, most who worked on it earlier have given up.
I think the downvoting part of this proposal makes a lot of sense, but I don't see why it makes any more sense at 50/50 than it does at 75/25 or even 100/0. All of the benefits of downvoting you predict would remain
I agree the benefits of downvoting remain but there has to be some sort of carrot to go with the stick otherwise the benefits of selfvoting are still alluring (some chance you won't get downvoted). We need some incentive to shift the use of stake toward useful curation and away from extraction. So for that reason I don't think 100/0 is very good. The other numbers could work. There is a lot of support behind the idea that 25% is just too low, and the gap of 4-1 between curating and self-voting is too high. But you are right the 'best' number isn't clear at all.
Maybe it's because there's nobody in the space, and figuring out the new evp is taking people some time, but right now curation is massively more profitable than delegating to vote-selling bots. I have one very simple bot that's returning 5x par. I wouldn't say I've given up, I'm just not particularly interested in maximizing my Steem holdings versus participating in a growing and diverse content system that empowers large numbers of people. That's where all of my SP goes - I'm leasing more for that than I'm using for curation experiments - and that's the mission that is going backwards with this change.
If there's no extrinsic value, it really doesn't make sense for me to spend my time here versus doing something that earns USD, regardless of how my rewards are distributed. 50% would definitely make Steem more profitable for me, but not really in a way that makes it make economic sense to spend my time here. What makes it make sense to be here is the mission of trying to build that diverse community of stakeholders, and the long-term benefit that may accrue from it.
Good points.