RE: Steem Total Value Powered Up - $37 million - March 26, 2023
We believe that these three changes, when packaged together, will shift the behavior of Steem Power holders in a positive way. Under these changes self-voting and bidbot usage will become less profitable than curating good content. While on paper author rewards are reduced, and curation rewards increased, we believe these changes will make it easier for good content to be discovered and rewarded, simply because that type of positive curation behavior will become more profitable under the EIP.
The net effect over time will be that more rewards go to good authors. Users should also spend more time curating content rather than voting for themselves or delegating out their power to bidbots because it will be more profitable for them to do so.
It seems that this problem has remained insurmountable. The whole problem is delegation. Without this opportunity, there would be no problems.
I agree that delegation exacerbates it, but the same problem existed before delegation was in widespread use (and you can still see it with certain accounts who are not using delegation, but are gaming the rewards).
IMO, the fundamental problem is that these changes were always done based on a hunch, but no one ever took the time to study the problem and perform a careful econometric analysis. As a result, it has remained too easy for large stakeholders to overvalue any post of their choosing.
Google built its entire business on the back of its PageRank algorithm. Steem's reward system serves the same purpose, but no one has taken the time to give it the attention it deserves.