Hi @kevinwong's I am going to steemfest and will be interested to learn more about these ideas. I have to admit, I understood only part of the concept and implications, but having said that what I did understand, I liked.

I think something needs to change in regards to how steemit's reward system encourages large account holders to put the majority of their vested stakes in bidbots etc. I am all for trying to petition a change to facilitate @steemit to make those mechanisms unprofitable. Here's the thing, I am a relatively recent (been here just over a year) and less technically astute steemian. Yet, regardless of not being able to contribute much in a developmental way, I have put a huge amount of time into community curation... and in regards to my content I spend upwards of 6-8 hours on many of my longer creative pieces. This means I am missing out on ROI in regards to vote farming, lol, it's no biggie as I can't put out a post I'm less than happy with so I'll never be doing that anyway. The thing I have noticed is that there are a considerable amount of others putting this level of care and attention into content, who are proportionally, rewarded terribly for their work. A lot of them are rightly aware of the value of their work, and so refuse to pay (bidbots) for the illusion of success. So what you are left with is a dwindling pool of talent slowly slipping away as the only true reward they are getting is an occasional @curie vote.

The whole mechanism of the reward system at the moment seems to be encouraging the abuses of bidbots and lazy whales, to make money through the exploitation of peoples hopes of success. By this I mean the hope of people that buying the illusion of success will somehow lead to them being 'discovered'. Early this year someone who was very talented who I had been interacting with left for this very reason, not the first instance of this happening.

I personally think that it's quite short sighted of people, even those who just want passive profit from investment, to see the current system as something that will pay them a maximum potential return as a true market leader If/when mass adoption of crypto in general happens. The front face of steemit (shit content boosted up by bidbots) could be the undoing of steemit in the end. Imagine a world where 90% of the global population are pouring money into crypto, the Proof of brain crypto platform that is actually showing the most (true, without vote buying/farming etc) success for rewarding quality will probably win out. With this current system it won't be steemit. There are already a shit tone of other platforms popping up; narrative, ono, whaleshares, the list goes on, I've just discovered a new one through a google search called publica. My point is that any of these that have a more qualitative system of reward when/if that magical crypto revolution happens 😉 will be the winner, the Facebook of this emerging industry/technology.

I think this 50/50 idea could maybe help drive things the way they need to go.

As I understand it, if it makes manual curation more profitable than bidbot delegation the passive investors will have to start trailing guilds who vote quality content to earn through curation, or make deals for sharing some of the profits through delegating to said guilds instead of bidbots. Thus a lot more value would go to quality content, making the trending pages the outward face to the world that steemit needs from a marketing perspective.

Bigger rewards for curators might drive new investment as publishing entities, magazines and all sorts of mainstream creative interests find a way to both source material for linking from their websites while also creating revenue off of their invested stake.

To tie back into my soc-media analogy, I firmly believe that if something doesn't change sooner rather than later, steemit will end up the 'my space' of blockchain writing platforms and we will all be worse off, not to mention the thousands, in some cases tens of thousands, of hours decent content creators have spent, wasted by allowing profit to go to people who have done nothing other than learn how to game the system.

Ha ha, this comment has gone on a bit. I might make a post out of it. It is worth mentioning that I was also inspired by reading @trafalgar's post Help Fix Steem's Economy! & @abh12345's post steem-curation-and-lap-dances which provided some interesting further analysis on your proposal.

Really interesting and I look forward to hearing more at steemfest 3 🙌