I have ranted about this several times over the last couple of years, but nevertheless I thought it should be reiterated because no one seems to have any memory around these parts. I have thought about the new witness proposals, and taken some time off to think about what I'm missing. I have concluded that I'm not really missing anything, and have to vehemently disagree with fellow witnesses.
Tweaking some parameters will not magically make things better. Indeed, most certainly, they will lead to unintended consequences that'll make things worse. Have we not learned from the last two and a half years? Besides, we have firm evidence and know exactly what is wrong, and no one's doing anything about the actual problem.
Weighted democracies have been a catastrophic failure throughout human history, most notably Ancient Rome, of course. When you put all power into the hands of the rich, it'll always end up in tears. Promoting a dozen people to authoritarian status is the finest way to make an anti-social network. Indeed, Steem is possibly one of the worst examples, given the despots here have accrued wealth through questionable means and could be anonymous entities without clear motivations. Thus far, the motivations are evidently pure short term greed - again, the worst possible trait to establish a healthy social network. (Yes, there are some good whales, and I highly appreciate them.)
To be clear, none of this is a problem for a blockchain project, or a free market project. However, it's a crippling, catastrophic issue for a project that claims to be a humanist social network project. The two options here are: To just make Steem an open information market, and stop the pretense of being a social network. Or radically overhaul the network to be more social.
Fortunately, Ned has realised that stake-weighted voting is doomed for unmitigated failure, a long time ago. I'm highly skeptical about his solution - account-based voting in conjunction with Oracles and SMTs, but it's darn sight more promising than the current stake-weighted voting system. Granted, that's coming from the bottomest barrel standard.
Unfortunately, it's taking a long, long time - 3-4 times longer than initially projected to develop SMTs with Oracles and account-based voting. We don't really have an option right now but to stick with the doomed stake-weighted voting.
So, coming to the point, where this was meant to be a witness update. I will reject Hardfork 21 if it comes with major changes like 50:50 splits and superlinear curve, especially if all of them are packaged together. I can foresee dramatic consequences that could lower content creator motivation and subsequently quality and engagement, among others. Sure, it may or may not make things better in other respects, but it's always going to be a bizarre allocation of rewards as long as you put all of your network in the hands of a few whales. (I know there are some good whales out there, and my hats off to you; but evidently, most don't seem to understand what "social" means.)
My vote is for focusing all resources into inventing a better system to allocate rewards; pending which focus absolutely on SMTs. Of course, as a low ranked witness it doesn't matter, Steem will go ahead with the hardfork, but I'll protest for what I believe is right no matter how insignificant my vote is. To be clear, better allocation of rewards being - the most engaging content and comments on the platform get the highest reward. It'll never be perfect, but currently, some of the worst content ends up with the most rewards, as anyone paying attention to the Trending page will agree. It's currently literally worse than a monkey randomly assigning rewards.
Note, this is not a vote for "doing nothing", but a vote for allocating limited resources into development of something that may or may not work; versus something that has failed us repeatedly from the very beginning.
For people who aren't aware of hardfork rejection: Witnesses can choose to not run the latest hardfork, in effect rejecting it. The hardfork will be rejected overall only if at least 15 of the top 20 witnesses also reject it. If most other witnesses do participate in the next hardfork, and I don't, I'm effectively giving up all earnings and block production, as a form of protest.
I have many of the same issues with DPoS, but we have bigger problems at hand.
I encourage open discussion, however, I won't be engaging with worldviews which show a callous apathy (or worse) for human rights. This is meant to be a social network. Finally, apologies for the sharp tone. If it suggests to you that I'm desperate, you'd be goddamn right.