There's a number of good options that would help to address the issues with reward pool inequalities:
- Diminishing returns on repeat votes for the same user - EG your first upvote on a user is worth 100% of its regular value, the next upvote is 75%, and so on, with a slow recovery over time similar to how voting power works.
- Diminishing returns on multiple posts per day - EG your first post in a day is worth 100% of the regular rewards, your second post in a day is worth 75% and so on. This discourages spam posting and encourages more high quality well-thought-out posts.
Both of the above could lead to other problems, such as people creating multiple accounts in order to get around the limitiations... But it's a decent starting point.
Other ideas?
- Penalize bot usage somehow. A big part of the problem is the fact that many large votes are handed out via automated voting by bots rather than users actually curating and voting on worthwhile content.
- Re-think post curation. The idea that a post's curation value is tied to the monetary value of the votes it receives is silly. Ideally it should be tied to the number of upvotes it receives relative to the number of views. EG a post with 5 upvotes and 15 views (33% upvoted) should be more visibile on the platform than a post with 1 upvote and 50 views (2% upvoted) regardless of the monetary value of those upvotes.
Your arbitrary attempts to control how people use their stake are pointless in the face of sock-puppets.
Reading your many replies into what appears to be the rotten underbelly of Steemit practices is acutely depressing. But thank you for getting to the gist of it.
Upvote count is vulnerable to a sybil attack and is a meaningless figure. Views are non-consensus and cannot be used to calculate rewards.
Bots are run by humans. Even if it were technically possible to distinguish bot actions (it's not), they are acting out the wishes of a human operator. This would be unfair.
Visibility of posts is one of the main issues currently. Right now you get visibility by either having thousands of followers, or by getting to the trending page. So pretty much the same group of people get most visibility (and hence most rewards). Both these ways of getting visibility are positive feedback loops - the more SP you have, the more easily you get to the trending page and the more SP this makes you. And the more following you have, the easier you get to the trending page and others resteeming your posts, so the more followers you make.
You can see how this leads to power/influence/rewards being concentrated into the hands of a limited group of people. The more you have, the easier it is to get more.
It's a problem with all cryptocurrencies (that I know of). There is lots of talk in the crypto world about the blockchain revolution being "the greatest redistribution of wealth". As I understand things, wealth will consolidate into a new limited group of people very quickly. So, the way to solve that problem is not by redistributing wealth, it's by designing a system that removes the problem.
So here are some potential solutions (or directions to look into):
I would not suggest Steemit, Inc. disposing of its massive SP stake yet. The platform is still too vulnerable to abuse, and someone could even overtake it. The platform has to show that it can solve its problems on its own before it's left solving its problems on its own.
Some good ideas here. We need more open discussions where the ideas can be brainstormed and the issue addressed because it is definitely plaguing the community
My post above is a perfect example of why the reward pool needs an overhaul.
That comment took me maybe 5 minutes, and somehow earned me $40+ in Steem Rewards. Why is it so valuable? What makes it a $40 idea? The ideas are good, but they're not that unique, and they're not well thought out.
Meanwhile I've written detailed posts on a number of subjects where I've spent literally hours and have been rewarded with pennies for my efforts.