RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal

I think you are absolutely right that "content indifferent voting being paid 4x more than honest content reflective voting" isn't really addressed by my proposal.

We strongly disagree here. I view this as of paramount importance and absence this, we have a completely dysfunctional social media platform due to its inability to discover and reward content. (and it's a complete failure right now). I strongly believe that a working platform with respect to the above vision would in turn greatly attract users, interest, businesses and ultimately investors would benefit far more than being forced to mindlessly defecate in public to obtain their staking returns.

There's no real distinction between an economy that favors vote selling (bid botting) and self voting. You're describing the current one, they're both content indifferent behavior. If your proposal favors 10x self voting, that would eventually be nearly the total equilibrium of staking behavior (it's already like 70%), which means you can't possibly 'draw in content creators' as soon there will be literally no rewards for them left on the table.

My proposal does not favor bid botting over self voting. It's an attempt to overturn the norm of content indifferent voting which they both are. A combination of higher curation and a certain amount of free downvotes is likely enough to actually turn the dominant form of profitable voting behavior here to become a content reflective voting behavior, either directly or through use of a curation bot. Because curation is a zero sum game and there's a 15 minute tax timer, it pretty much forces fair play as long as the other incentives compel us to play at all. The hard part is optimizing the numbers around curation and amount of free downvotes to maximize effectiveness over costs.

Intentionally designing a platform that encourages stakers to vote 10x on their own posts a day and to view voting rewards as staking rewards is a bad idea. It's exactly what we have today (albeit unintentionally), it's a flaw, not a feature. The current price is indicative of investor interest in a broken platform that encourages this behavior. This is the most obvious redundant use of inflation. Why have an inflation if it's just to make investors spam on a garbage platform just to get their staking returns? Why not just remove the inflation and internalize that value into the currency itself? The only justification for having an inflation is if that inflation is distributed in a way that brings in more value than having the inflation itself, for example, steadily passing currency from the stakers to the talented content creators to incentivize them and expand into a robust social media discovery and rewards ecosystem.

I feel you really underestimate the importance of social pressure and of the potential of an advertising economy. The important distinction is that providing a functioning advertising system and removing the reputation benefits from bot up votes together removes the incentive to use bid bots and shifts the most viable business model for bid bot owners to either the 10x up vote of their own posts, or the I believe preferable 10x up vote of their own comments (as this won't affect trending and won't undermine the content part of the platform).

Your proposals taken together, especially the down vote pool make the opposite move more likely to occur. Remember, bid bots don't need to post and down voting bid bot users just for being bid bot users misses the actual abusers. So by implementing features likely to hit the own-comment up voters that leave bid bot owners bullet proof in all ways that count do in the end promote bid bots over comment up votes.

From a short term money flow perspective both may be equivalent, comment up votes don't disrupt trending and don't disrupt the reputation system and are thus by far preferable. And if you end up discouraging both, in the end this would likely lead to the big players without an intent to curate powering down and selling their stake, driving down prices.

I feel we want to keep as many big players on board for market risk sake, but in the meantime add an advertising economy that makes us less dependent on inflation all together and that can help us make abusing the voting system something that people do become socially accountable for.