You made 3 good points in this posts that I wanted to comment on:
- Bid bots pretty much rule the platform.
- Very few stakeholders are spending time looking for quality contributions to reward.
- Many users who contribute a lot to the platform struggle to get any decent rewards.
Let's start with the last one. New people coming into Steemit don't have a large following and won't be getting payouts, no matter how good of an author they may be. Cutting the author rewards isn't going to encourage newcomers into the platform.
Now the first two points. Bid bots do control this platform because everyone knows very few people actually read post here. To make any kind of return on your effort one has to utilize the bid bots to get it. And the bid bots make money from curation. People also sell votes on posts they never read. Instead of looking for quality post to read and make comments on. These seem to be the activities you would like to minimize on the platform.
Increasing the curation reward at the expense of the author is rewarding the behavior you want to minimize. Currently if a post makes $10, that's $7.50 to the author and $2.50 to the curators. Increasing the curator portion to 50% currently would only reward bid bots and vote sellers even more.
Why stop at 50% anyway? Why not make it 75%, 90%, or even 100%? The result is going to be the same, there will be fewer posts on here to curate. By the way, this will be the same regardless of a post making $10 or $100.
How about looking for a method to actually reward people that read the post and make a valid comment on the content of the post. You have to find a way to do this without rewarding the bots that go around upvoting or downvoting automatically also.
In my opinion, simply increasing the curation rewards will only result in fewer people writing posts on Steemit.
I just had a pleasure to read your amazing comment @mikehamm
Seriously big respect for sharing your thoughts and for your time
This new 50/50 reward system can only work if so called Whales would actually start delegating their Steem Power to quality curators. That would indeed allow those curators to be rewarded for their work and benefit entire platoform.
I'm simply afraid, that this will not happen. That at the end most whales will continue auto-upvoting publications of very few people, with their powerful votes and without putting any effort they will start earning x2 more than they did so far.
It surely would encourage them to slow down with powering down, which in effect would most likely bring up the price of STEEM. But that is the only positive outcome. And what would happen year from now, when those "whales" would start dumping this easily earned STEEM?
Yep. People will only care about buying STEEM and delegating it to bots and enjoying rewards (which will double now).
Yours
Piotr