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RE: Assume a can opener -- A critique of the snowflake plan
From a broader perspective, what @snowflake wants to tackle is not undesirable voting pattern itself. As he mentioned, the problem of curation reward is it "has turned the platform into a completely fake system where everything is run by bots and driven by money". In other words, the motivation is an issue rather than the results (voting patterns).
However, I agree that removing curation reward can harm human curators with the current profit mechanism. We maybe able to solve it with taking alternative ways. For instance, submitting articles to curators with reward sharing (Github issue 773), posting editor's pick, etc.
I question the causality. I do agree that the system tends to be inauthentic, and i do agree that bot voting is part of the reason for that inauthenticity. Just showing that two things co-exist (the current curation rewards system and inauthenticity) doesn't show that one thing caused the other. The two things might have a common cause. Or, they might be two completely independent phenomena.
IMO, the current curation system is rigged toward whales and bots, which let many users disappointed and consequently make the system inauthentic. First, for free users, who are potential investors, with around 30 STEEM, they don't earn meaningful amount of curation rewards. And many of them only vote several times per day while bots do tens or hundreds times, which decrease human users curation rewards. Unless you are a whale or a bot, curation reward may mean nothing but attracting bots.
Curation rewards are only a part (and a small part at that) of the curation system. The larger part is author rewardshhich is which are way more rigged, and bigger than curation rewards by a factor of probably close to 7:1.
The guy with 30 steem power, unless hes incredibly lucky, earns no curation rewards at all. Remember if its under 2 cents they round it down to zero. Id be curious to know what the least amount of SP anyone has ever earned a >2c curation reward with was (in current times since steem has been valued at 10-20 cents). If i had to take a stab, id say in the vicinity of like 300 steem.
Then again, its debatable whether brand new users with 30 free steem power should be earning any curation rewards at all. I don't think curation rewards (as they exist now) are a viable steem entry point -- im just not sure they were ever intended to be. I think new users should have opportunity here, but every single feature or reward does not need to be geared to convert new users to investors.