I don’t even think curve changes can help for all the reasons you described. People would still calculate the most efficient way of deploying their stake across multiple accounts to counteract the curve.
I think you have it right with social pressure & cultural change. A big part of that is downvoting. I feel the stigma the flag holds now needs to be removed and it needs to gain acceptance among the community.
Downvoting is very important. All the altruistic "big voices" such as @timcliff, @Patrice and others, including my smaller dolphin self are working hard to get people to understand the importance of the downvote in corrective action such as this. Could you be at risk of spiteful retaliation? Sure, but does that in turn shine a poor light on an asshole spite voter? Usually, yes, and the good whales love to eat those guys for breakfast.
Sushi anyone?
Absolutely. Particularly in the case of abusive self voting, if that individual revenge flags it’s nice to realize they have effectively turned every vote on your blog into flags against them, since the amount of voting power they need to counter your rewards they would have been voting themselves in a vacuum. If you draw out revenge flags, you’ve sneakily made everyone who upvoted your work a flagger in your cause!
I remember when Dan was proposing a “negation” mechanic and I think this could be revisited. We have upvotes with downvotes as an inverse action. If we’ve added delegation, we should conceivably have inverse delegation, having a portion of your SP negating the SP of another as Dan proposed. Bad actors can be neutralized without “censoring” their posts or needing to code a bot to automatically follow all their actions around.
In the case of the most well known rewards dispute ongoing... genuine followers feel like the content they support is being attacked by flags and their vote and voice are trying to be suppressed. In actuality there’s only about 3 accounts voting patterns under scrutiny creating 92% of the rewards, and using their stake in a way that some in the broader community feel is irresponsible. If negation were possible, the average user would never see any flags, the post value wouldn’t decrease as it had never gone up in the first place, and the actual follower support would be left untouched - resulting in $20-$30 rewards per post.
50% attack? Control more than half the SP on the network, negate everyone's SP, and you can vote on yourself for 100% of the reward pool.
The social stigma of downvoting isn't the only issue with it. It's also extremely time consuming to use it efficiently. @steemcleaners is a full time job and they're only fighting a percentage of the small fries. Vote negation was supposed to reduce the amount of time and energy put into preventing abuse. It would be a good place to start, downvoting wouldn't be enough.
I don't think you can ever really lose that stigma. Most of the time a minnow isn't going to flag a whale account, because their flag is just an irritating fly to them, but that whale can wipe them out with their return flag. I really don't know how it can be seen as anything but a punishment.
To a point you are correct, but every week on the @SteemStarNetwork, both @patrice from SteemCleaners and I on our respective streaming shows, remind everyone to flag anyway. Make the point, use your voice. If the whale retaliates spitefully, let me know.
This is where quadratic rewards empowered even the smallest of minnows with the chance to trim a decent chunk from a high payout - low quality post.