Thanks for taking the time to detail the proposal; also I note your effort to declare any conflict of interest in your intro - love it!.. However you have missed out several (possible as they seem obvious) which are inherent to us all under the current governance system - for instance you will receive a dividend from curation or post as a share holder, the larger the holder the greater the conflict - you will never remove these types of conflicts with these 'tweaks'. Declaring interest and transparency is a good first step to finding an improved governance solution - Steem could really moon if you guys keep working on your awareness on governance and honestly examining this and all our roles in it..As I have studied this at university I could help a witness if they reached out and I've had enough coffee - I have a few experimental theories I have developed watching Steem closely now for a couple of years :)
For HF21 I have some concerns like @carlgnash -- I'm running heavy on coffee so my brain is a cloud to get deep, so I'll just say I accept HF21 - lets go for it!!
In the end we have the systems we have today and if the witnesses decide this is where we want to go, we will support and try to make it work for the benefit of Steem.
If I could just have one wish - pls set some measurable objectives and a reasonable time frame to achieve (watch and report often) using pre-determined success measures, i.e. report honestly with facts how it goes and share it transparently with all - if the update doesn't work, be prepared to move quickly to HF22
My head hurts due to lack of sleep but I'd try to go deeper because I love Steem :) - This means call out some worse case scenarios - so lets say objective one is to reduce all bidbot unfavourable rewarding by 10% in first 20 days and see a reduction of a further 1% each day. Sweet as, what webpage can i visit to see how HF21 is going on that objective - it would be heaps good.
Cool think about how you take a measure now before and a measure after. Then report to all of us how we went on that objective..did it go well, did it go bad - tell us if its going really bad and that exit strategy is to be engaged, etc.
It's actually ok for it to go bad, if you have done reasonable due diligence. I actually don't mind mistakes if we learn from them.
I wish us all the best with coming HF21 and my fingers are crossed. I still feel strongly the issue isn't one of 'abusers'; I don't see any here - just Steemians all trying to make a buck and great platform that is free to allow people to try different things to achieve that..I see the problem more of one of inherent conflict of interest, like the dividend shareholder example I gave above. Hope this all makes sense - Thanks again for such an informing post - sleep for me :)