The proposed EIP changes is just a case of chasing our tail. Increasing curation rewards will do little. Bid bots will also get more curation rewards and the self-voting whales will collect in curation instead of author rewards. A lot of people bid-bot to save face and not to make money. To my knowledge, the only people making on bid-bots are the owners.

Vote buying is going nowhere and is even more prevalent on conventional social media. People talk about shadow-banning but on traditional platforms, EVERYONE is shadow-aded. It is pay to be seen out there or don't get seen at all and don't even see those you follow. Outside of the trending and hot page, that is not the case here, even with bid-bots.

There is no getting around bid-bots. They will simply go off-platform like with all other social media. Ever heard of click-farms? Do you really think potus and the kardashians have all those likes authentically? They don't.

That doesn't mean we can't make things better but shuffling around the same number of eggs in the same basket is not going to do it. We have to reward the behavior we actually want to see.

My suggestions. Please see my response to another post from earlier. today.

I think we have to give up the idea that producing quality posts is the raison être of the steem block chain. Certainly it is nice when it happens and that is always my intent but it is not necessarily what the block chain needs to succeed.

What we need is engagement, first and foremost. I have said before that we should junk the rep scores. They mean nothing and everyone knows it and instead institute an engagement score. We can get cute and call it a quotient (EQ). A perfect EQ is 1 and it is maintained through upvoting mulitple accounts (far too many to fake) and making unique and mulitiple comments. Everytime you upvote yourself, your EQ shrinks. So if you have a score less than 1, you will not receive the full payout of any post or curation. The difference returns to the pool.

In this scenario, the use of bid bots serves to better the community. Because obtaining a bit bot upvote only gets a steemian half way to payout. Now he must engage with the platform meaningfully. Perhaps there would still be room for a steemian to upvote say one of their own posts a day, but then he would have to engage and upvote, in the very least, with those that left comments on his post.

Community would be sustained and built. There would be more eyes on the page and ad revenue would grow and so the price of steem. So maybe I would make less money on posts ( It will probably be the opposite) but now one steem is worth whole a lot more. Forget about altruism and do the math. 100 000 steem at 10 dollars a steem is worth a hell of a lot more than 300 000 at 30 cents.

So I make more money for less work. One would assume that making a post is more work than reading and commenting and I let the system do the work for me instead.

To bringing people on initially. Allow newbies to join and upvote and comment without having to open a wallet. Once they see others making money that they have no access to, they will educate themselves and might even pay a nominal fee to obtain a wallet.

#teamsteem