RE: Steem Improvement Proposal: Revoting Power to counter Upvote Circles and Bid Bot Abuse
This was really well thought out, and it does seem like an effective means to tackle the current perceived abuse of circle votes by whales, self voters, and bid bot, and vote buying. I say perceived abuse because I see it as debatable as to how bad such practices are hindering the economy of the system here. I have noticed several of @trufflepig's reports, which are awesome, have pointed out the trend of minnows and dolphins gaining more gradual influence over time, despite the lopsided power of whales circling their votes to eachother and the prevalence of bots.
Personally, I am not a fan of system changes that penalize the entire community from their current abilities, to hinder the actions of those who are using the same abilities in a way we disagree with. I do not provide a solution, other than suggest that people should continue to invest in and support their favorite authors. The majority part-time users prefer to support their smaller interest communities, rather than scour the feeds several times daily for a an author they have not reviewed before. I would rather not have to resort to rewarding random posts every day to earn a curator reward, which no longer has meaning to me as providing value of my interests.
Anyway, I think I may have an unpopular view on things, but I do like to support minnows with the vote value I am currently able to provide. It takes me a long time to trust an author to give them my continued support, and I don't give it every time with an autovoter. If others want to do that, I think that is their free choice, and they are also paying for it with real money to enforce their right to choose how to use that free will.
If there is a solution to improve their search page, and the tags feeds, so that top expert curators were revising those lists, I would be more in favor of this as an organic solution.
These are good points, especially I like the expression perceived abuse. I haven't added any data about the issues, that is true. And it is definitely worth to investigate this much more to put bid bot promoted posts into a perspective vs. organic good content.
Thanks to @trufflepig, however, I do have some numbers at hand. So usually people spend about 15-20,000 SBD and 2000-4000 STEEM on bid bots each day. These are heavy numbers if you consider that only about 50,000 STEEM are added to the reward pool in the same amount of time.
But yes, this proposal would penalize everybody, or at least affect their voting behavior. Yet, if everybody benefits, I think this might be a worthy sacrifice.
Again, you have raised some valuable criticism, thanks! I hope this is encouraging for everybody to also point out flaws and errors in this proposal. I really appreciate this :-)
Yes, thank you for your positive perspective. I am considering adding a delegation to @trufflepig for your efforts.
Now you got me thinking about another approach to improve the blockchain, by having expert curators on given tags. They could be voted on like witnesses, and could gain influence and rewards if they provide valuable suggestions for worthwhile posts to be viewed in a combined feed of the tag they monitor.