RE: How would you like rewards to be allocated?
Thanks for this important discussion. I believe there is no mechanism that cannot be abused. But, we can do much better than we are doing now.
I would in part keep the current formula, but include a soft cap of max rewards. If your post hits let's say 100 SBD just as an example, adding another whale vote worth 30 SBD should be worth significantly less. Also, although voting strength should still be based on SP, it should also include different parameters like user interaction, the diversity of voting (a certain % of votes for always the same accounts or yourself should trigger a reduction), reputation score (which should be calculated differently to correlate better with the actual reputation within a community), and expertise in a field (e.g. if you earned a lot of SP withing the "art" tag, your vote on posts using that tag should get a bonus).
Anyhow, this is all super-heavy to implement and would need some serious balancing work.
I have proposed using an algorithm that dispersed rewards based on Huey Long's proposal for income: no one should receive less than 3% of the median, nor more than 300%. This leaves two orders of magnitude to create incentive for quality content, but doesn't leave any content void of incentive. It also eliminates the ability of whales and bidbots to mine rewards, as the median is so small that massive stake has no interest is such pittance.
This would be unpalatable to everyone (we all want massive payouts, and like lottery players, fail to note that we dream impossible dreams) unless a means of gaining higher profits exists. I therefore proposed nominal dividends from delegating or directly funding development via the SPS mechanism @blocktrades has recently completed, and devised for the use of the @steemalliance foundation that has recently determined it's corporate structure, and is intended to fund development of the Steem ecosystem.
There is a fundamental difference in affect on the investment vehicle between capital gains derived from increasing the value of the investment vehicle, such as development is intended to create, and extracting profits from the investment vehicle, which is what bidbots presently do. What I propose is to promote the former as a means of enabling ROI, and discourage the latter.
Any way that is achieved will improve the current situation regarding Steem's market performance. Water flows downhill because that's what the code (physics) makes profitable in energy cost. Investment simply follows code, just like water.
Thanks!
I like this idea - a flattening of the reward pool. This is similar to a publication I used to work for as a video game journalist. Everyone got paid the same for their reviews, whether it was a romping, open world, 80+ hour RPG, or a whimsical puzzle game.
If something was longer form, or was to bring in huge amounts of traffic, or warranted a follow up article or response to an editorial, that meant more money (by virtue of more ads being served) - but could sometimes be a short extension of the original.
We can always reward comments more handsomely than posts in some instances, especially when the author goes out of their way to add real depth in their comments section.