Believe it or not, you can collect evidence for propositons by running tests.

Yeah, sorry, this is about 50/50 curation again. But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we want to have something besides obtuse economic arguments to base our decision-making for the whole platform on. How would we go about that?

Well, one way to do it would be to set up a small percentage of the platform's posts with higher curation percentages than everyone else's, and make sure everyone knows about it. Then we can watch whether people's voting behavior changes based on the curation percentage on that post. To make it really convenient, we could make that exclusive to one front end which signals its posts clearly, so it would be really easy for users to tell a high-curation post from a low-curation post.

If high curation really drives more voting, we should see votes gradually moving away from the rest of the platform to votes from the high-curation front end. We should see people moving their SP out of other passive investments and into bots that only voted on those high-curation posts. That's the promise 50/50 supporters are bringing us - increase curation and more people will vote.

Except we already tried this. From May 8 until September 26, Hive account@dtube offered approximately 40% effective curation on all DTube posts through taking a 25% beneficiary reward and redistributing those funds to voters with an automated system. They didn't steal significant amounts of votes from other media. They didn't cause a significant number of users to abandon bidbots. More or less nothing happened, because people's external motivations actually matter more than the curation reward number. They eventually gave up.

Now maybe 40% wasn't the magic number, although there have been no arguments for 50% being the magic number other than halfsies is appealing to the human brain. And maybe DTube didn't promote it enough. I know it was not as well-known as it could have been.

But hey, what was done once can be done again. If the supporters of 50/50 want to provide 50% curation rewards on their posts, they can do exactly what DTube did by redistributing some of their author rewards, or adding a beneficiary to do it for them. They certainly have enough eyeballs on the platform to advertise it far and wide. They can play with the number if they want to. If they're right, if they take it high enough their posts will take the votes away from everyone else and others will be forced to follow.

If they think 50% curation rewards on their posts will generate more voting, they have the power to make that happen without a code change. I'll even write the bot for them. Then we can have real evidence of the resulting behavior.