Good post, thank you. I like many of your suggestion but the few I disagree on are:
2. Treat Blog posts and comments the same.
Do you mean that a comment like "Great Post!" should automatically have the same weight like an entire 500 words blog post? I don't agree with that for in this case I think very obvious reason. My apologies if I misunderstood your point.
4 – Adjust the reverse auction to a much shorter time frame.
I don't have the stats but I believe the majority of voting is currently done automated via bots. If that assumption is correct than I don't see a benefit in this proposal since all the bot users have to do is change the voting timer down from 30 minutes to the 1st minute. So it would all remain the same. In my opinion the timer logic should be removed all together.
There have been some circumstances where i have written replies that were longer than the original post I was replying to. An OP can be short or long. A comment can be short or long. There's really no difference between them.
It was added to prevent bots from dominating the curation reward pool. Curation rewards are heavily weighted toward early voters. If there were no reverse auction, bots would just be able to vote on everything as soon as it was posted and get a significant portion of curaiton rewards.
The majority of voting is not by bots. It seems to be about 20-25%, although it is difficult to tell especially because some accounts use both bots and manual voting, and not all forms of botting are alike. For example, following other users using trails or bots is really a form of delegation and not pure automation.
Users will determine if a one liner is worth more than an entire 500 words blog post.
What if trump creates an account and write steem is great, is this worth more than a 500 blog post? Idk users will tell.
Steem is going to be used by hundreds of different sites with very different use case, it makes no sense to say that one post should be rewarded more than another.
I think many people think too much of steem as the website steemit.com, you need to think of steem as the underlying blockchain that could power every website in the world.