The problem? Attention scarcity among whales. The solution? Delegated voter pools
How could it work? As a trial, implement the feature allowing:
- A whale to select a list of minnows or dolphins to delegate their voting power to.
- A randomization, in the form of a randomly generated list of minnows to populate the voting pool.
In my opinion, each person who has more than a certain threshold of Steem Power which we could deem to be more than a human being can reasonably distribute, could be given the option to opt-into the delegated voting pool feature.
Those who opt in, would then create a list similar to a follow list, but in this case it will be a delegated voter list, which would populate a voting pool. This voting pool would then be able to vote on behalf of the whale and the voting pool would be rewarded with 50% of what the whale would get.
In addition to this, the option to let a whale set the delegate list to random. In this case the voter list is randomly selected.
In my opinion, randomization should add this twist, that for two days out of every week, all whale voting power will be distributed to random bloggers on Steemit. These two days out of the week could be any 2 out of 7, and the bloggers could be any with a high enough reputation.
A/B testing
If it is a trial, then we can now treat it as an A/B test. We could analyze the flow of Steem Power to determine if the changes are improving the flow of Steem Power or not. In my opinion, this test might be controversial a little bit, but it's way less controversial than reward caps or any of the examples which would seem to punish bloggers. In fact this would give bloggers a bit of responsibility, and empower bloggers to be curators for a while, since a lot of bloggers seem to want to complain about how whales are doing the curating.
Summary
A lot of bloggers complain about the curation abilities of whales. Whales have a problem of attention scarcity which can only be solved by using bots or by delegating their voting power. If whales have complete control over the list without randomization then it's open to coercion or other risks, but if there is the element of randomization it makes it so no one can predict what will happen for two days of each week, which would provide a nice data example to analyze.
Thoughts everyone?