RE: Idea: Rethinking the Voting Power system for a better Steem network
Bots and outlier voters will reduced to irrelevance. They'll have to contain their voting to a similar magnitude as human voters.
I'm sorry, but as long as there are curation rewards, this will never be true of bots. I promise you that no matter how convoluted you make the voting power curve, no matter how nonlinear, no matter how pro-human - because it's math and money driving the show, it will always be possible to automate optimal voting.
Your proposal says something like "75-ish votes per day should be penalty-free, and more than that come with a severe inefficiency penalty." Then the bot optimization strategy is easy: figure out how how big an optimally-sized vote should be, and spread SP out among as many accounts as necessary to make each of those accounts' first 75 votes the right size. Done. Benefit to humans negated, but with the added baggage that you've given me an incentive to split my SP among several accounts, which doesn't help anybody.
In which case, the bot is no longer an outlier. As you know, I have no problem with non-abusive bots. Indeed, around here more humans are abusive than bots.
I'm kinda agin 'em. I do not value the opinion of a bot. I may value the opinion of a person. Regardless of my disdain for the opinions of bots, those opinions devalue my opinions by competing with me, and with other people too.
Bots may have uses, but competing with humans in valuing content is not an appropriate one, imho. Dunno how this might be achieved (I am not a coder), but I reckon it oughta be.
No matter how I see it there will always be ways to game the rules. I would propose Steemit to become more "Facebook" like. Do you see bots on Facebook? Maybe, but not as rampant compared to Steemit. The best way is to remove bots totally, if we want to read higher quality posts on Steemit.
That's more because there's a) no financial incentive, and b) it's a privacy oriented network.
I'm curious. Should we place the emphasis on maximizing financial gains or should we prioritize value creation?
It seems to me that only by creating value first will we be able to reap financial rewards. If Steemit is invested for the long term, it should remove bots that hurts its potential for future growth.