Interesting (and good) to know that this idea is actually being discussed, and that some stakeholders are aware of the suboptimal curation situation (which can be quite frustrating for users who try to curate manually)!
Concerning my idea, right, the self-votes are a problem, the flags part of a possible solution.
Actually, I would modify my idea above in a way that reduced the benefits of self-voting:
- Convergent linear curve for author rewards.
- Curation rewards depend only on the own vote weight (HP, percentage of the vote).
- And (that's the addition): lets go back to 75 % author and 25 % curation rewards. :-)
I know that the probability to see this last step is rather low ...
Some time ago I had the idea of 'diminishing returns' (against self- and circle-voting) when upvoting the same accounts again and again (within a short timeframe), but it seems that can be circumvented by creating many alt accounts (even if it still should be suspicious and detectable if a certain group of accounts only upvotes each other).
... I will keep thinking about possible other solutions ...