RE: Steem Improvement Proposal: Revoting Power to counter Upvote Circles and Bid Bot Abuse
This sounds like a smart solution, or at least a good basis to start with. Full disclosure, I use the bid bots. As a minnow starting out it seems almost impossible to build a following without getting on the trending page. And you can't get on trending without having followers to vote you there. It's a catch 22, and the bots let you break it. I haven't posted much yet, but I think what I have is quality content, and it would be great to not need the bots to get exposure.
That said, I do see one other flaw in this idea. New users with only a dozen or so followers would have an extremely difficult time gaining traction. Let's say all of their followers upvote one of their posts. A week later they could post the greatest content in the world, and it would be buried by new posts before anyone could see it. So maybe the vote weight penalty could be related somehow to the inverse of the number of followers. This would allow minnows to get exposure even with a small following (that could vote for them often), but once they get more followers they also get exposed to the vote weight penalty.
Well, I have used bid bots again and again, too, because they are the only way currently to get traction.
However, part of the reason that they are the only way to make it to the trending page is because they exist and everyone else uses them.
Moreover, I would beg to differ, this proposal would rather help minnows with a small follower base instead of hurting them. If revoting is punished, much less of the reward pool is distributed among whales and voting circles that abuse the system. Hence, much more money will be paid to regular authors and payout is determined by content rather than by follower base or upvoting circles. Similarly, in order to obtain curation rewards you need to search for good content (simply automatically voting on your default go to author won't suffice anymore), again this benefits authors that write good content instead of people with a huge follower base.