You find it troubling that Steemit inc lets stake holders decide what "anything good" is like it should be
This is the exact opposite of what HF20 is doing. When you vote and assign rshares to a post under HF20, some of those rshares (which currently go to the post author) will be destroyed based on what votes have come in during the fifteen-minute penalty period.
They are taking away some of your stake and using it to increase the rewards value of all rshares across the pool. The same vote will have different influence over the rewards depending on what post it's given to. If you vote on a post that has no votes in the penalty period your vote will continue to have as much influence as it does now, but every vote that goes to the post in the first fifteen minutes will reduce your later vote's effectiveness.
So the rshares that are being redirected are those that author would gain from all votes before 15 minute mark?
I thought the redirection would only happen to rewards that author would gain from selfvoting before 15 minute mark (curation rewards only) but by your description it applies even without selfvote from author?
And now that we're talking about how much control the system should have over the stake holders, I think it's clear that we need to have rules layed out on the blockchain level that encourage behavior that is beneficial to everyone and not just the highest holders of SP. For example now we can see that the trending tab has been taken over by post promotion, yet the Steemit Inc still speak about "proof-of-brain" with straight faces, which is a bit amusing to me, @ned you agree?
So it looks like the investors will take the shortest route to maximum possible financial reward - and that's why we're seeing promote bots, selfvoting (through multiple accounts) and circlejerking.
This kind of behavior should be altered by blockchain level rules as human is greedy and needs rules as otherwise we'll see others misbehaving and having to choose between acting good and losing money or following others and doing harm (in my opinion) to the whole ecosystem. Steem is a laughing stock when it comes to quality content currently.
So I'd say Steemit Inc really should take a step back and think about ways to guide users to act good rather than bad on this small, fragile ecosystem. Some simple rules like decreasing voting power on repeated votes towards same accounts would force people to actually widen the reach of their VP rather than setup systems that vote on their behalf also increasing curation rewards greatly would make actual curation and proof-of-brain more likely to happen instead of whales just parking their SP to promotion bots that everyone can and needs to use to reach trending feed with their questionable quality content.
These are my current thoughts on this issue. How popular would Reddit be if its trending page would be just full of advertisement like here on Steem, @andrarchy you got any guesses?
Yes, it applies to all votes before fifteen minutes, not just self-votes.