Steemit doesn't have this problem to the degree that the "biggies" do, and that is another feather in our cap going forward. If we ever do succumb to demands to advertising, we will be putting ourselves in harm's way as described here, and losing another element that makes us unique AND DESIRABLE to potential newbies.
According to this, almost all web-traffic figures, ad click-through rates, unique views counts of specific content (like Youtube videos) are ALL fake and vastly over-stated:
Sure, we have our own issues here on Steemit, still, with destructive use of bots to bogusly inflate people's upvotes and vote values, and even in creating bogus content and fake accounts. But, our issues pale in comparison to those of Facebook and the other social media giants that use bots and ads as a standard matter of course.
Our biggest problems remain in the realm of encouraging fair payment for valuable content, so that our newbie retention and usage rates can be lifted from their current low levels. I will drop an idea in that regard here in a minute, but first, we need to do a better job of promoting Steemit (now that we know the truth about these others' bogus metrics) in order to garner more new users, and to encourage people to SWITCH to Steemit. Maybe we can get some EXTERNAL ads of our own going promoting Steemit, and paid for by these enormous stores of Steem, SBD and SP that seem to just be laying around in our own Steemit, Inc. storage accounts...? Surely there are people here who could make very wise decisions about how to promote our advantages with cleverly-targeted advertising.
Now...for Hardfork 21...If we have done enough to clean up our own bot issues with HF20, great. I suspect not, and I suspect next-step interventions may already be on the drawing board, and should be pursued. With regard to rewards. I think we need to supply an algorithm that both inflates rewards for all users with high rep scores, and that drops the current reward paid out for accounts over certain SP thresholds based on users reputation scores. After all, shouldn't a user's reputation have at least as much impact on determining the value of their contributions here as the amount of money they may have gambled on the platform? Not everyone begins with the same expendable income, and IMHO, people's contributions should be measured equally by what they have done to reach certain rep score thresholds as they are on the amount of SP they hold. (We may need to look at very large SP holders --say, over 250,000 SP--a bit differently, and that can be discussed too. i.e. people with the potential to really hurt others with malicious, ideologically-based downvotes should have their damage auto-limited, or eliminated, based on some type of community consensus. Also, if multiple accounts by the same user can be safely proven, than those accounts should be counted as ONE account and all subsequent adjustments should be based on the total SP of those accounts and applied to all those accounts.)
Here is a suggested rubric that can be tweaked anyway the community things wise.
A. Newbies should get double the current rewards they are getting for the first 2-3 months they are here. We need to HOOK them, and those pennies can be taken from the top end to benefit the long-term life of the platform without those users missing anything.
B. People with rep scores of 50+-to-60 should get a 25% markup on the current payouts based on the SP of their upvoters.
C. People with rep scores of 60+-to-65 should get a 50% markup on the current payouts based on the SP of their upvoters.
D. People with rep scores of 65+-to-70 should get 100% markup on the current payouts based on the SP of their upvoters.
E. People with rep scores of 70+ should get 150% markup on the current payouts based on the SP of their upvoters.
Conversely, people with accounts with more than 5000 SP should be penalized on their payouts based on LOW rep scores.
A. Persons with a sub 40-down-to-30 rep score with more than 5000 SP should get a 25% cut in their payouts based on the upvotes of their upvoters.
B. Persons with a sub 30-down-to-20 rep score with more than 5000 SP should get a 50% cut in their payouts based on the upvotes of their upvoters.
C. Persons with a sub 20-down-to-0 rep score with more than 5000 SP should get a 70% cut in their payouts based on the upvotes of their upvoters.
D. Persons with a sub-0 rep score with more than 5000 SP should get a 80% cut in their payouts based on the upvotes of their upvoters.
It may prove that 2000, or 1000, makes a more sensible limiter than 5000 for the purposes of the above. We need to try to counterbalance the "savings" from Part II to the additional payouts needed under Part I, and I have no idea how, or how much, those adjustments may need to be, at present.
(We need to also talk about if people doing the voting get an adjustment to the effect of these votes on their voting power based on who they are voting for, or not. I.e should the percentages above be added to the "cost" of providing that vote to those ranges of users?)
Again, these are just examples and we can tweak them however you like. But something needs to be done to balance out value of contributions beyond simply basing everything on the amount of SP people have. We might also be able to look at "smart" readers that go beyond word count and actually have the ability to determine "readability," "quality diction," proper grammar usage, non-use/misuse of others work (plagiarisms) when determining eligible values of given posts, but that may be a subject for another day... Such a system could replace or adjust the suggestion above.