It seems like everyone on Steem is talking about voting behavior these days. Whale circle jerks, bidbots, the trending page, everyone is trying to figure out how to actually distributing the rewards pool in a way that actually recognizes quality work. There's a lot of good ideas out there, delegate more to curation initiatives, flag shit posters, ban bid bots, but I think that frankly all of this dances around the fact that the voting structure on Steem is fatally flawed and cannot be fixed short of a major hardfork.
What fatalist trash! Abuse is equal to productiveness of PoW mining? Sure, maybe if a significant portion of your blockchain's value wasn't derived from content. And you can argue they are failing in ensuring "abuse isn't so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work." Sometimes I think Steem Inc. doesn't really know what Steem is. Is just another blockchain that happens to have fast enough transaction speed to handle the demands of social media? Is it a blockchain for content? Is it a dApp Platform? Steemit sometimes feels like some libertarian experiment where positive and negative are discarded as concepts and "the market" is the ultimate judge of value. It's like a massive test of the collective action problem and it's currently failing miserably. It forgets a market of self-interested actors tends to end up an Ouroboros and just eats itself.
But that attitude is not the fatal flaw of Steem, merely a reason why they don't seem to have fully considered how they built the system. The problem is the structure of the system incentivizes rent-seeking and profiteering. It all has to do with the current method for determining a value of a post. It makes the same stupid mistake that conservative economists make when discussing economics, that wealth gives you a vested interest in the success of the system as a whole. The wealthy generally give zero fucks that the system benefits the entire population, they just want it to make them more wealthy. So of course making the reward system based on accumulated wealth (SP in this case) is going to devolve into the wealthy trying to take as much of the pie as they can. It's in their interests to.
So what would fix this? Well Steem actually already has a value for determining who the best actors in the system are, it's your reputation score! As they say, money can't buy class. You can't buy a reputation, the only way you can earn one is by contributing and being a good citizen of the platform, kind of the same way it works in real life. Bid-bot accounts don't have a a high reputation, so they would lose their power almost immediately. And shit posters motivation turns to gaining rep, not buying votes. We do however still want people to hold on to their SP so that there is actually a reason to buy the tokens, so you make the voting value based on some factor like rep-score squared * SP. Additionally, I really like the idea of delegations to communal curation projects. However, you should be held accountable for your delegations. If a delegated account gets flagged for things, all delegators to that account get a share of negative rep.
On that note, flagging needs to be unchained as well. If it were more common place around here it might not be seen as a personal attack on your entire lineage and everything you've ever loved the way it is today. Currently you up vote a post, you get a curation reward, they get an author reward, everyone wins! You flag someone you get nothing but smugness and a mortal enemy for life. Plus you now have less voting power for rewards. The fix? Separate flag power and negative curation rewards. If you flag something and the post value goes negative, you get a curation reward from that. Downvoting content is every bit as important as upvoting, possibly more so. Otherwise there is no hammer to take to the low content posters trying to make a quick buck. With no real consequence, why not just spam and buy votes?
So how do we get the voting behavior we want to see on Steemit? Well don't hate the player, hate the game. The current system incentivizes the wrong behavior. Currently to be successful here you just need to get valuable votes by whatever means are necessary. All that leads to is our current situation. What you need to do is change the structure so those who build the strongest reputations here have the most power. Then the means to succeed here becomes about how can you be the best Steemian you can be. The only way we can do that however is a complete teardown of the voting system and replacing it with something that actually gives us the intended result.