People will have more incentive to curate organically more, meaning profits should even out if not increase for authors as people are engaged in curating others more, especially if the combination of nonlinear and free flags goes through. You see it as losing a third of your potential rewards and making it more profitable for others to bidbot but you need to consider that the witnesses and major stakeholders, for the most part, aren't in it for the short sprint to the bank. I don't know if you were around when @abit and @smooth among others (ftg I think, maybe even berntheburn) were all either actively flagging another dolphin, orca, and mostly whale votes in order to distribute the power to the masses but it was by almost all accounts a success. The problem at that time wasn't bidbots, as Bernie basically capitulated on the idea first with @buildawhale or some similar bot that worked on a "lottery" by sending it one Sbd and having a chance of getting anything from 3% to 50% vote, the numbers are probably off but that's beside the point, the problem was the curve of n^2 which meant someone with 100 SP had 100 times more voting power than someone with 10 SP, while someone with 1000 SP had 10kx the effective SP compared to someone with 10 SP and the experiment dealt quite effectively with that disparaging gap in power without waiting on Stinc to actually change that. Most of the large stakeholders do have the foresight to see that by devaluing curation they effectively shoot themselves in the foot. Yes, some have caved in and seemingly abandoned principles for the FOMO and who's to say that their 'earnings' won't be used to curate instead of being dumped on the exchange? Ultimately they aren't dumb and they want to see their investment baby grow up and mature as many dropped their life savings into the promise of this genial manifestation of incentivized/tokenized social media. It doesn't require faith that they will use their SP to curate if Curation is more incentivized instead of Selling it, especially if nonlinear is implemented which dissuades stake splitting and consequently delegating to bots. If they have an incentive to flag, instead of wasting their VP, then it's a trifecta which bots won't be able to defeat. If we take it a step further and allow people to delegate the free flags then we could return almost all self-voting, shitposting to the reward pool/distribute it along the rewarded posts evenly, thereby increasing the value of content platform-wide.
Your concern about not earning as much because of the cut into author rewards is short in considering the intent of the proposal for the assumption that this is a money-grubbing scheme. Yet the proposal isn't pushed by characters that readily support bots and as I mentioned, kevinwong is wittingly or not exasperating the situation so that the issue of bots is addressed because you don't see bot-owners jumping at this proposal and rightly so, they don't want any light shined on them because invariably everyone recognizes that by invalidating curation the whole system implodes. In reality, curation is as important if not more so than content, and without a functioning curation, content becomes a joke as it will compete on the level of the biggest pocket and the shitpost farming that will dominate the spotlight.
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