Let's assume you are right and if everyone voted for "quality content" (whatever that is) the price of STEEM would go up (more than otherwise, since we have seen from experience that the price of STEEM can certainly go up despite garbage content being voted).
Nevertheless it is still a tragedy of the commons situation where if everyone (or nearly everyone) did X, it would be great, but since you can't control what others do, your own decision to do X individually only further enriches the others with little to no systemic benefit.
The action that serves long term rational self interest is for stakeholders to support changing the underlying economic incentives that make doing X far more individually profitable than not doing X. For example, reducing the costs and social discouragement around downvotes would allow them to serve a useful purpose in pushing back on those who are allocating rewards without adding value and shift incentives toward voting to allocate rewards in a manner that does add value.
Without a sound economic footing that includes real discouragement of commons-spoiling behavior, the system relies entirely on altruism, and while altruism does exist it is a scarce commodity and countless ages of human history has shown it does not work outside of limited circumstances.
BTW, I don't watch videos so whatever you said there may contradict some of what I wrote. My reply was based on the written post and our other conversations.
Hey @smooth
I just wanted to pick up on your 3rd paragraph and mention @steemflagrewards.
These guys are doing a pretty good job (on top of Steemcleaners, Patrice, etc) whereby you flag obvious Spam/comment farming/plagiarism etc, tag them in your reply on the Post/Comment, and drop the link in their discord. Once they've reviewed the situation and approved the content/voting as abuse, they'll upvote your reporting comment.
This seems like a nice way (and fair play to whoever's SP this is) of 'reducing costs' for flagging to me. I wonder if it's something that some of @burnpost's SP could be pushed to?
Just to make clear, I'm not in any way tied to this account.
A recent example here: https://steemit.com/dmania/@abh12345/re-shruti11-besram-bap-zg1hbmlh-2i4jn-20180516t180213910z#@steemflagrewards/re-re-shruti11-besram-bap-zg1hbmlh-2i4jn-20180516t180213910z-20180516t191606
Cheers.
I took a quick look at @steemflagrewards and it does look like an interesting effort to help fight abuse. I wont be able to delegate @burnpost SP to it at this time because @burnpost has a charter not to engage in or delegate to accounts that engage in upvoting. The reason i did this is to be 100% certain that the SP isn't used to personally enrich anyone.
Ahh, that's fair enough. Thanks for the response.