RE: Programming Diary #29: Imagining the "value per feed" curation model
There's definitely a long way to go with the voting service idea, but the other side to the competitive dynamic is that the ROI for a successful author can be much higher than for the old-skool services, so that will (theoretically) attract more top-tier contributors. And they'd receive additional rewards from organic fans/followers, too - which could also be much larger than the voting service. Then, even if the old-skool bots remain, they should decline in visibility over a long enough timespan.
OTOH, I think it will have to be some sort of hybrid. The vote size would still have to be based partially on the size of the investment. No idea how it would be weighted, and I guess that would probably change over time according to market conditions.
Edited to add: The other aspect of this is that long-term investors might delegate to a service like this as a way to automate voting for the protection and growth of their investment.
For this to happen, my assumption is that somebody else’s rewards would need to be much lower - initiating their migration to other services.
I don’t know what kind of margin these voting services work with but the only way to avoid the “robbing Peter to pay Paul” analogy would be if they were willing to reduce their margins. Or maintain a higher voting capability themselves. i.e. the delegated amount will earn a consistent x% vote per STEEM delegated and the top authors are competing over the services own y STEEM vote value.
That could work.
And maybe the value for "y" could be increased by receiving delegations from non-author investors who are interested in protecting the value of their stake from devaluation. As @dan put it some years ago, (paraphrasing) an upvote for one post is the same as a downvote for all others.
Additionally, non-author delegators could be further incentivized with a share of curation rewards.