Thanks for taking your time. As everywhere in our lives, set rules affect the game outcome. I get why it works for staking. totally legit, but on the other hand it affects voting which in turn affects content creation, that affects adoption and then has impact on price action that would affect staking.
Simply put, you can not have rules working one way and then ethics telling to act differently. It might work on some participants but the bias is still set by the rules. I personally believe that better content and bigger adoption would have much greater upwards price action than artificial inflation through staking that i believe is not viable long term. And it's gonna fork and fork and fork until some timeline with will eventually hit the sweet spot and get the adoption.
And i was not suggesting, hiding transaction or stake information totally, just moving it from UI where it would make time inefficient to go look, search ( and most less tech savy users would not even bother) and then vote more on higher stake hodlers.
Also, content discovery based on payouts is totally inefficient, it only means that big stake holders opinion is always right and they tell what good content is which would sound ok, but does not work because of financial incentive mechanics present.
I am still running a small boostrap photography community and kind of encountered the same problem, where guys with more time and followers on the platform, would gain the momentum and their content would be more popular because of that initial boost since people tend to get social acceptance and like content that has been liked many times before (call it mass endorsement if you like). What we did, we simply hid number of likes before other users voted so his/her decision is not influenced by how many users already liked the image and it had a huge improvement on overall quality of content showing on popular or trending pages.
And i am not against what steem was or hive is or what the next fork will be until the best solution has been found. I just want to say that voting patterns are still currently not about the quality of the content but the size of the stake.
And it is very easily to prove. Just power down any mediocre content account from 50k to 200 k and you will see what drastic change of engagement it will be.
There are some exceptions however where excellent content is produced by accounts with high stakes. But they are exception from the rule that is prevailing today and usually used as an example in the argument :)
The bottom line is what you want: to positively influence upwards price action through demand in short term or better overall content quality and engagement through bigger adoption.
Preaching ethics will only go so far. System rules set the outcome of the game.