I think you're over thinking it, bidbots and large investors will find a way to leverage their downvoting power efficiently and that alone will clean the house and concentrate rewards to chain beneficial initiatives.
Going to 50% curation reward will simply require much more downvotes to counter the circlejerks stacking votes on feel good content.
Vote buying won't go away with a simply more complex curved curve. Vote buying is not easily monetizable while it should be, so much so that all vote buyers eventually compete for near 0% profit as some have content they actually want to promote at a cost, some have content that will attract downvote or organic upvotes. If votes sellers are so obvious to detect they can be removed from UI views, or downvoted in a systematic manner.
I'd be interested to get on a discord call to discuss these things with you.
BTW I fully agree with your take on SPS finding
In the three years that I've been here, coordinated and systematic downvoting of sub-par content has rarely ever been a thing. On the few occasions that this has occurred, the whining and crying from the user base was so loud and vilifying was so strong that the downvoters mostly became disgusted and stopped caring altogether.
As I said already - unless the culture changes regarding how downvotes are perceived by the user base, I wouldn't expect a lot more of it to occur, even from those with large enough stake to not care about being targets of retaliation. The crying will likely reach record heights, because now users will actually be losing money on their vote-buying, instead of "losing money" by simply having their rewards reduced.
I'm not sure it would require much more downvoting. With the voting curve changes, I think it'll likely be a wash. Besides - the more larger accounts that downvote, the bigger effect they'll have when the algorithm is near the linear end of the "convergent" curve.
If anything, I would think that posts that are both heavily upvoted and downvoted will likely reach a generally lower equilibrium point than under pure linear like we have now. And author rewards would certainly be lower.
Oh, of course not. People who want to buy and sell votes will find a way to do it under any system we have. It's just the amount of buying and selling and how lucrative it is for the parties involved (at the expense of the rest of the community) that's a problem.
I would like "the bidbot problem" to be handled more by the interfaces as well. There are better ways to promote content on your website that is lucrative for the website owner, its users, and any potential investors. By not even bothering to address this, interface/website owners are completely missing out on revenue and improved content discovery/ranking.
I would love it if just one interface actually did things right around here. But at this point, I'm not very hopeful.
A call might be possible sometime soon, but I'm always available to text chat whenever you can: ats-david [ats-witness]#1997