It's a good point that the hope that manual curation would increase is most likely misplaced. Your argument that manual curators with large upvotes would quite simply not have time to do that. That's why the distribution bot @ocdb is such a great thing. What it does is speed up the process by which stake distribution improves with the secondary benefit of improving the average quality of content. @nonsowrites suggested that instead of the reward system change, Steemit Inc should consider delegating more to communities where distribution takes place in a natural manner. That actually makes much more sense than any kind of tweaking of the reward distribution. It was such a shame that Musing and DSound lost their delegation. DSound in particular was a pretty awesome community. Ned said he pulled the delegation from DSound because he hadn't heard about it, which was a pretty arrogant move, as he should've considered choosing the cuts from a wider point of view. I'm glad that he's no longer CEO at Steemit Inc.
The argument has been put forward that 50/50 curation has yielded good results on smoke.io. Maybe. But how big is smoke.io? Could it be that manual curation actually works better on very small platforms despite a possibly very top heavy stake distribution? Maybe Steem is already too large for manual curation to work without delegations to communities.
Then again, maybe this change will not make a big difference - one way or another. I
What it does is break proof of brain.
It rewards folks when they pay to play.
IF they bend over first, gotta be whitelisted.
Stinc delegations rob everybody to reward the favored.
Just a fact in the math.
@ocdb?
Proof-of-Brain is a fantasy in a stake-based voting system like Steem. It has never worked as intented and it will never work as intended.
The most important function of Steem Power is voting for witnesses, that is, Delegated-Proof-of-Stake. For this blockchain to be truly decentralized and secure from manipulation or attacks, Steem Power must be sufficiently evenly distributed. @ocdb is a distribution bot. It's non-profit for those who run it. Delegators get 90% as much as they would if they self-upvoted and the authors get 10%. It's a necessary evil in a system that is not only broken but based on false premises concerning human nature.
Proof-of-Brain can only work when people obey certain rules. That is possible only in a community where there are no anonymous accounts (perhaps pseudonymous but not anonymous) and where the community has the necessary tools to counter bad actors effectively. For Proof-of-Brain to work, SMTs with oracles, or at least a much better distribution than STEEM currently has, are needed. STEEM is a consensus layer token that should be distributed much better than it currently is with Steemit Inc owning over 50% of the stake. Steem could be killed with single shot to the head if, say, the US government wanted to shut it down. They'd only have to arrest the owners of Steemit Inc and force them to give up the master keys to accounts controlled by Steemit Inc. That MUST change.