@lemouth I'm glad others are starting to see this perspective. This is mainly a reply to you but I want a little more visibility so chose to write it as a reply to the post. Thank you for being one of the few who are starting to see things this way.

If the Steem economic system has decided it wants to reward the most banal, effortless, proof of brain dead and by all other metrics valueless behavior the most, then don't be surprised that's exactly what people do.

Don't be surprised if most of the large stakeholders sell all their votes to bots that exploit the rewards pool at 100% efficiency, or self vote 10 of their own comments every day, or lease it to the market for high returns that can only realistically be paid if the borrower used all those delegated votes on himself.

This is no longer a problem of good or bad actors. They may want to raise the most money to cure cancer, or kill puppies, we don't know. The point is we're choosing to go with economic incentives that rewards the dumbest and most pointless behavior for the platform the biggest returns.

The Good News: It is trivial to prove that this is fixable

All you have to do is instate a new economic scheme under which the way to maximize returns is not just mindlessly sell your votes to the highest bidder or vote yourself up 10 times a day. I'll give you a terribly impractical example but one that will highlight this point.

Simply bump curation rewards to 80% (not advocating this, just an example). Notice how now it becomes trivially easy to beat some guy who's only getting the value of their own votes, either through selling or self voting? All I have to do is to find content early enough that I believe will have at least some interests after I vote. So I get 80% of the value of my own vote as curation, and only need 80% of the subsequent votes to make up for the 20% difference. (I know it's not how precisely curation works, but you see my point).

I'm not advocating for 80% curation under linear. I foresee problems at economic equilibrium that's about as bad as what we have now. But one cannot deny that different incentives promote different behavior. Because behavior that maximizes returns under one economic scheme may not at all be competitive under another. We're not stuck with bid bots and self votes at all.

We just have to come up with an economic system that rewards desirable behavior that promote the value of the entire system the most. It is very possible for a different economic system to reward exceptional curation and authorship far more than mindless self cannibalistic voting behavior. Getting the details right is non trivial, and there will be trade offs, but I think we can get something that's almost utopia compared to what we have right now.

A lot of heated debate right now is occurring under the misguided assumption that the system has to operate at the combined self sacrifice of returns of individual actors. This is just flatly untrue. It is also a losing fight which explains the futility you're feeling. Right now there's an attempt to force individual self voting whales to vote at least 20% on others. What's the best case scenario here? You spend $100 to take $100 from him and place it back into the rewards pool, only to have at least $70 of it go back to others just like him. Let's say he surrenders and just recedes into a bot, so now he's taking even more from the pool because it's 100% efficient. Or worse, he finds some other bots that use hundreds of accounts to self vote their own comments to hide his tracks, taking just as much from the pool, and bloats up the blockchain. There is no deterrence factor at all. Are these really the trenches in which good actors think is worthy to hunker down and fight to the death for?

We don't fight people who are maximizing their returns because it's fighting people for not being sufficiently generous. That's not a sensible fight to have. The economy cannot rely on the acts of moral saints alone to be sustainable. We should fight to introduce a new economic system where individual profit maximizing behavior will contribute to the value of the whole platform, rather than erode it. We let everyone's profit maximizing efforts work for us, not against us.

For the record, I think something like slightly superlinear (not as much as before) with 50% curation, burning curation instead of donating to author in the first 30 mins (something hf20 is already introducing I think), maybe a separate downvote pool. It's difficult to predict what it would be like at economic equilibrium so coming up with alternative schemes is always a challenge. But honestly, any reasonable guess would be far superior to what we have now.