But my fear with 50/50 is the Jerry, Haejin, and Kingscrowns will start having $1,000 posts because people will follow the money regardless of the quality of content.
There will always be some users who operate this way, but I don’t think it’s significant enough to influence protocol changes.
Check out SteemAuto and look at how many votes for Jerry Banfield on autopilot.
Yeah, he has about 500 followers on SteemAuto, but 500 isn’t a lot, considering how many users have been active on the platform since that trail started. And I’m sure most of those trail votes are minnow/dust votes, so the impact on reward allocation will be fairly low. As you mentioned, the returns aren’t even good for most of those voters, so don’t dismiss that these low returns won’t influence the decisions of curators looking for better curation rewards.
I’ve had a relatively large and influential trail before. I can tell you that the auto curators will evaluate returns and make adjustments.
Users (especially whales) will follow the money. They will get in early and big for the ones they know will take off. Very few will give a damn about content quality.
There is a good argument for this, as it has happened in the past. But a lot has changed since the first year and many of those large voting whales are not as influential as they used to be, mainly due to powering down, delegating stake to other individuals and projects, and dilution.
I think the biggest concern would be the influence of bid bots, but I would imagine that better curation incentives would make a dent in their received delegations. Speaking for myself, I would withdraw my delegations if 50/50 was approved. And there are others who have told me that they would do the same. Whether that would actually happen is another story.