Combination of Self-Evaluated & Auto-Adjusting Limits

Hive account@inertia posted the following More Max Payouts = Less Bot Impact

Hive account@inertia has recently experimented with the existing STEEMChain mechanism to allow authors to set the maximum allowable reward for a particular post. In the two posts shown here he has set the maximum payout to 0.99 cents. The downside of this is that any votes made on the post after this maximum is reached are wasted, as the voters would still be expending curation power each time.

Hive account@inertia, in the above article, describes some of the benefits of making this capability available to everyone 'in' the STEEMIT UI. I think this is a great idea, and we can take it a step further. Firstly, do make this available to authors .. if they do not wish to use it, no maximum will be set as a default (well, maybe .. see a little further on). The obvious benefit of this is for author's to make a judgement about what they put up .. today we have seen many "First Posts" .. a great many in-fact (a suspiciously great many!), which were just one paragraph and a link, or a sentence and a youtube video. If you are normally known for long-form posts, but wish to put up a mindless meme, then you might conscientiously set your maximum to .50 cents., whereas on your 'effort-ful' posts, you would wish there to be no maximum (again .. read on).

This act would not only encourage people to support your post, knowing that there is no chance it will skyrocket unjustifiably, but also it would greatly aid in maintaining a healthy rewards pool. People appreciate when someone says, hey .. this is not my genius, I'm sharing someone else's, so maybe throw me a few bits for the effort ..

When such a limit is placed by the author, it should be noted in the post as a UI function .. so that people will not waste votes after the maximum is reached (either that or make a change to the code where additional votes would not negatively impact the supporters curation power).

Taking this all a MASSIVE STEP FURTHER .. would it not be wise to have an automatically adjusting, STEEMwide maximum reward, based on the current health of the rewards pool? Mmmm.. something to think about! All of this combined would make flagging-to-reduce-rewards entirely unnecessary (which I believe was a point that Hive account@inertia had made in his article).