RE: Changing the Code to Incentivize Curation
Many people have claimed that buying votes is mostly to "promote" their content and get eye-balls on their posts, attention, etc. It wasn't about making money by buying votes, they said.
Well, that's bullshit. I don't like the idea of vote selling in general, but as long as it's allowed and as long as I can do it, I'll buy votes from markets instead of bots. That way, I grow users instead of contributing to the growth of a bot.
However, I'm not that type of guy who spends 100 steem/sbd to buy votes, even though I could really need money due to my current situation. I spend a handful of steem/sbd, because I want to earn more.
I don't really care about exposure and visibility, because manual curation is slim and the only way to get more exposure is by buying votes for literally hundreds of dollars to push your content to the top of trending. Anyone buying votes for 0.10-50 is not interested in exposure. They don't do it in an attempt to advertise. They do it for the profits. Just like I do.
However, I've seen people talking about the fact that vote buying would stop due to 50/50, because buyers would earn less when voters would earn more. And even though I somewhat agree with those statements, I don't think it will stop or be prevented completely. In fact, I think people who're buying votes, will continue to buy votes as long as they profit. No matter if they earn 0.1 or 10.
If the profits are smaller, they would ultimately just buy more votes to cover up the loss from 75/25. Most people are buying votes to earn and to grow their accounts, just like users are circle-jerking. They do it because it gives them as much as possible.
50/50 would only increase garbage posts and automated means to vote, because truth is, that rewards is not the problem. The problem is engagement. People are passive on Steemit. Just look at the netcoin competition...
50/50 will reduce the overall quality on the posts and ultimately, there will be no more content to vote on... So 50/50 is a good way to earn today, for large stakeholders and for vote sellers, meanwhile it's yet another nail in the coffin for Steemit.
All vote sellers or bots have to do, is reduce the cost for the same amount of upvote % that gives less return, and bring back the same proportions that are profitable... Curation and bots are pretty passive compared to creating content. Clicking with a mouse, or autovoting and selling your vote is what many do to not have to do even a mouse click after looking for stuff to upvote. Money rules.
So many people only care about the investors, trying to draw in more investors. The claims were numerous about how "Great" vote selling would be to draw in more investors. Where are they now? Why isn't Steem filled to the shit with investors who can just take advantage of selling votes rather than give them out for content they want to reward? atsdavids posts is more about that, about how 50/50 is a good thing to try because we need to bring in more investors, because they matter and maybe will want to invest if they can make more with curation... maybe... but like you say, it's another nail in the coffin for the primary app of posting content.