It's not a great argument logically, but it's a very practical one from the perspective of an investor.
I played very altruistically for about 8 months, but after witnesses some of the actions of bigger whales lately, it's hard to decline using a substantial amount of voting power which I bought on myself. While I may not be the best actor, I'm far from the worst with 4-5 votes that are late enough to give others a bit of curation and not flood the hot/trending pages, but not late enough for others to disagree on rewards.
A lot of this is due to the greatly inflated SBD prices, which renders passive income not very competitive. Thus, thankfully, all this should be temporary as SBD price will over time normalize back to its pegged value, at which point I'm willing to go back to less than 3 posts a day, and I'm guessing you'll see less 10x full daily votes on posts or even comments from more larger stakeholders.
I'm guessing there are some suggestions for increasing passive SP income a bit. This, in addition a more stable SBD (which will happen as Steem price increases anyway), will perhaps offer enough incentive for larger actors to behave more selflessly. People don't generally invest in crypto for entirely altruistic reasons; your'e never going to get most people to act entirely selflessly, be it content creators, investors or witnesses. But I do see it improving over time.
Steem is much fairer than it was a year ago, and likely will be much fairer than it is now in a year's time. A lot of the current commotion, which I'm not entirely able to resist, is due to inflated SBD which will inevitably go back down. I think with some slight adjustments to passive income, things will look pretty good around here.
This is reasonable proposal you're giving
I understand the return of investment is skewed due to SBD
Even Jerry Banfield / Bot was promoting upto 60% APR return due to SBD >> Steem
But as normalization occurs you can also change it from
4-5 (100% Upvote)
to
5-6 (50% Upvote) = 3 x 100%
There are more and more people coming in these days, and I can foresee the new generations of big minnows, dolphins, orcas, and whales will eventually pile on to support and enjoy the lighter side of Steemit, making it a stronger and justified payout for the mentorship and talent scout that you bring to the table
You effort as a leader here in promoting Humor, Punchline, and Funny has not gone unnoticed by the community
We need strong leadership, consistency, and the likes of your abilities to wrangle with wry
Also proud of you Traffy hugs :p
Sorry can't witness vote you (I just refuse too), but, I did gave upvotes - 50% to Luke & 50% to You to show my support and solidarity between our leaders here!
To be clear, I don't think altruism is a very helpful word. I think we all take action based on self-interest, even if it's just to create the world we want to live in. When I advocate for minimizing self-voting it's because I think too much self-voting will keep some investors away who think Steemit is a scam. That, in turn, keeps the price of STEEM down which hurts all investors. "Resisting" may be a selfish strategy also, just one with a much larger timescale which embraces whatever will increase the value of our holdings.
Thanks again for explaining your perspective openly and honestly.