RE: Hard Fork 21: A Case For the 50/50 Curation Reward Model

The proposed change to the rewards split does mean that self upvoting is less profitable, since more of the rewards are split among a higher number of people and thus also stake. It does not really provide a guarantee that people won't continue to just sit and upvote themselves, however.Hi @crypto.piotr, I will give my 2 steems on this, sure. ;)

Since curation rewards increase as the community gets behind a post, in theory it is possible to earn more from good curation under this system and that is a good thing for the network and post quality. If there is a strong culture of curation then that is a good thing for stopping bots too.

The downsides are present too, though, of course - in that bot operators will just adjust what they do to fit in with the new rules. They may start paying out curation rewards - whereas currently they keep them.

I made a suggestion months ago to implement changes to User Interfaces so that posts that are boosted with bid bots are either (optionally) hidden completely from people's feeds or are adjusted to have the bidbot reward component removed from the calculation that is used to determine their position in the feeds. Each user could opt in/out of this and even choose which bots and accounts they personally want to have effected.
I also provided a method for Steemit inc. to use their ninja mined tokens to force bid bots out of the market.

I think that these two options are sufficient to prevent the problems of the bid bots without needing to change the curation/author split.

It is not possible to know exactly what is going to happen if this feature goes live - but I would take the middle ground of being open to experimentation without going the whole way, by opting for a 33.33% and 66.66% split - then seeing where that goes.

I am also concerned about the downvote pool changes, I consider those to be a potential nightmare due to the total lack of social skills held by some of the whales.