It's better to handle "abuse" with blockchain protocols
I'm afraid not every abuse prevention is possible to implement on the blockchain. Indeed some recent changes resulted in increase of abuse.
If I invite 20 of my friends and family members here and they all post twice per day, then my daily voting power can go to just their parent posts.
Nothing against that. But what if these 20 users spam the system with shit posts? This is were humans are needed, to determine if something is abuse or use. In a situation where circle voters are voting for shit posts, I'm not saying that this needs a strong arm intervention immediately, but I also dont think we should just accept such behaviour.
Yeah, I'm not saying that every abuse can be. But the code can certainly mitigate a lot of "abuse" of the rewards allocation system. We've now seen what different protocols can mitigate or exacerbate. I think it's safe to say that some protocols do in fact prevent some undesired behaviors. Those are the protocols that should be retained so that constantly policing the platform wouldn't be as necessary.
The idea for the code is to make things as "fair" and intuitive as possible. Simplify it where it can be simplified. Implement protections and abuse-mitigation where they can be implemented. Lessen the impact of those putting in minimal effort - or doing harmful work - and reaping disproportionate rewards for their "contributions."
Hard fork 19 accomplished the exact opposite. It has created additional incentive to do less work. It has made "abuse" more lucrative. And it has made interaction and any reward allocation "consensus" unnecessary.
Coding can't fix everything. But the wrong coding can certainly make things much worse than they are and require an extraordinary amount of time and effort to combat undesirable behavior.
Again, I agree with what you are stating.
Although I do not think that the complete HF19 was bad. The change to the square root curve for post rewards, I do like. I'm not sure of the linear curve that was the replacement is the best way forward, but this is part of HF19 that was not that bad.
On all other points I agree, lets build (back) into the code those things that will reduce the abuse. Any abuse left that can not be handle by code, let that be handled by a body within the community rather than by individuals or groups of community members, since I believe the best way forward in whatever we do to fight abuse, shall be done with community consensus, so we need a system where the community can vote for what we define as abuse and what not. This can only be done centrally. Then we can have smaller groups supporting the whole thing.