Implementation - Minting of SBD and Steem to curators and authors will stop, and the reward pool will cease to exist. It can be gradual. Steemit.com, Dtube, eSteem can have their own SMTs. (Or they can collaborate to create one.)
Some SMTs can be stake-weighted, some SMTs can be completely centralized. (i.e. influence over reward pool is allocated to vetted accounts by owners or admins of that SMT. Miscreants and abusers are promptly banned from allocating the reward pool.) Or the best case scenario, an SMT can have a combination of multiple approaches. One possible approach would be people vote for curators instead of witnesses, and the top voted curators get to allocate the reward pool relatively. This will have to be weighted by community engagement metrics or some kind of reputation system to avoid Sybil attacks. It'll remain decentralized, but also try to achieve a more sensible way to allocate coins. Just thinking out loud here.
The point is - this will lead to competition, and who knows - maybe a couple of SMTs will hit upon an actually sustainable solution to making it work. It's clear that the Steem reward pool has failed, as far as content creation and valuation goes. Open it up to the free market, let it come up with solutions and the market will decide which one "wins".
Steem will benefit being the core asset to all SMTs.
Of course, SMTs are many months away at best, and I don't have an interim solution.
Yeah the last sentence is what I would worry about most. SMT's won't be launching till years end and by removing the reward pool I think you would be removing the biggest incentive for new people to join the platform. For all its downsides, steem has created something never before seen and there might be more bandaid solutions until we can reach an agreement on the proper direction to go.
Why not something as simple as a self-vote drains your voting power exponentially rather than linearly like a regular vote, this would do a lot to curb behaviour. Weighting content creators vs curators at 60/40 would also help with this. I think these little things could be enough to right the ship, but I agree with you that all options should be looked at and let the free market decide
Of course, none of this can happen before SMTs are ready for prime time.
There's no way to separate a self-vote from a regular vote. People can make multiple accounts and end up with the same result. Agreed on the creator:curator split, but it's another bandaid at best.
Sometimes though a bandaid is all you need to fix a cut. I'm not sure we are at the point where surgery is needed to fix the problem, but there is definitely a cut that needs immediate attention. I think maybe focusing on good rather trying to stop the bad is one way to look at it. If those who curate are receiving sufficient rewards for their effort I think the snowball effect will take over just like the slef-voting epidemic has done ths far.
There are the obvious self-votes, and there is covert self-voting - like delegating or giving away steem power to a bot that will always upvote your own content, having agreements like "I always vote for you, you always vote for me" with other account holders of the same size, etc. I think it's not good to promote the latter.
Yeah the last sentence is what I would worry about most. SMT's won't be launching till years end and by removing the reward pool I think you would be removing the biggest incentive for new people to join the platform. For all its downsides, steem has created something never before seen and there might be more bandaid solutions until we can reach an agreement on the proper direction to go.
Why not something as simple as a self-vote drains your voting power exponentially rather than linearly like a regular vote, this would do a lot to curb behaviour. Weighting content creators vs curators at 60/40 would also help with this. I think these little things could be enough to right the ship, but I agree with you that all options should be looked at and let the free market decide