You know... a long time ago I put out a post calling this current economic system a clusterfuck and put up some circle jerking images. There are lots of problems.

There doesn't seem to be any will to change anything though largely because much larger factors are taking precedence. Velocity, appbase, community, hivemind, and SMTs seem to have much higher priority though they haven't manifested yet.

Personally I think linear rewards is just a backdoor hack for the distribution on the platform. The ninja mine that was done to avoid starting this place as a security, which is starting to impact all the other ICOs and may have been a very wise decision created a warped distribution. With 100 account shave 90+% of the steem curation is incumbent on them. 100 people can't curate for 1M accounts very well so things have gone wonky. Delegation and bot voting is a free market solution to that problem, but doesn't fix the underlying challenge.

The linear rewards package (including swithcing from 40 votes to 10) sparked some bad self voting and we've seen curation rewards practically double since after the hardfork. Pending comment payout is filled with megawhales simply upvoting themselves for hundreds. Minnows don't want to flag for realtiation and economicly miniscule results. Whales don't want to give away curation rewards to flag abuse.

On the postive side we've also seen Utopian and the Minnowsupport account rise up and help people, but that wouldn't be possible without linear rewards. There are other projects too, but programs that try to reward peopel with votes would be severly hampered without linear rewards.

There was vote selling prior to linear rewards as well. It was just a lot more hidden in back channels than it was out in the open.

So, ultimately I walk away with a few conclusions-

There is no political will from Steemit and many witnesses to go back to exponential rewards.

Linear rewards needs better curation, which I think means a separate down vote pool so that whales don't have to give up curation rewards to flag bad content.

Steemit should put some of their "non-voting" stake towards abuse. They've done that some already, but more is better.

The biggest change I can think of would be to increase the inflation rate on the platform to 10% and hold it there for a while and simultaneously remove teh stake weighted inflation that whales get. If we make for better curation with down votes and have a higher inflation we'll get a better distribution of well deserved rewards.