This is a reply to https://steemit.com/news/@vishalsingh4997/time-to-end-whale-wars-solution-that-can-solve-major-problems-on-steemit, which I decided to write on its own post because it is sooo long.

Pic Source

Here are my proposed solutions to the issues on steemit, aiming to end(or at least appease) the whale war:

Bear in mind this are just my opinions on how to improve the nework, not aimed to offend anyone..

Post count:

Firstly, I believe we SHOULD limit the number of posts to 4 per day, or at least make it so that no rewards are paid for root posts after the 4th post per day per user. Bear with me, I´ll share with you why I think its a good idea. How many posts can you write in a day without sacrificing quality? I would dare to say that to make 4 high quality posts, you would invest most of that day. If the posts after the 4th don´t get reward we don´t just limit spam, but if there is something that absolutely needs to be comunicated, let´s say a plane crashes in the house next to you, I bet you can surely write about that, even if you have to do it pro bono in your 5th post of the day.

Why I think this is necessary? Mainly the spammers on DMANIA who posts several memes a day to plunder(I won´t say rape) the reward pool.

Reward limit:

This is an interesting argument on both sides: On one side, the vlogger who comes from youtube to steemit with a following of 100000 fans should be able to earn his worth. However, a counter argument is that how fair is that to the minnows who are spending months growing a following from 0. Every single celebrity can become an insta whale, and unlike people who invested and don´t post(thus they don´t drain the resource pool), they can become a noticeable drain on it.(You can actually see the overall % for the rest of the people go down). In youtube there is no reward pool, the money come from several sources, but as we all drink from the same reward pool on steemit, bad things will happen in the future if we don´t put some soft caps. Let me ellaborate.

While I don´t believe this to be a huge problem right now, since the value of STEEM and SBD are relatively low, in some probable future, where STEEM is about USD 25 or more, it shocks me to think that these guys would be taking home about USD 12500 per post, on a $1000 post, and they can post 4 or more times a day! We are not talking about the potential of THOUGHTS over here, we´re talking about POPULARITY. There are a lot of underappreciated undervalued posts out there that don´t get any love, and there are people who just make the same fart jokes they did on youtube and make bank for a vacation in the Polynesia. The "true value" of posts is very subjective, like art, so we won´t ever agree on that, but we can all agree that popularity is exponential, and that can be bad for a network where everyone gets paid from the same pool. An analogy is: if there is a single radio and everything I hear most of the day is "The Rolling Stones", it´s not that they are bad, but there is literally tons of indie music out there that doesn´t get noticed. Popularity is like that: in the near future there will be a few authors with huge followings getting 90% of the rewards while most minnows, and even dolphins starve, and while I don´t believe it should be symmetrical(not doing crypto communism here, just looking out for the system), I believe if this goes unchecked it would be the slow end of steemit because eventually there would be an exodus of minnows and dolphins to other crypto-blogging networks that pay more(there will be many out there since steemit started a trend), and that would be very bad for steemit. Let me put this slightly out of context so you see my point: would you work for a company where all people earn their money from the same pool and the top brass gets 90% of the money and the 10% remaining goes to thousands, or even millions of employees? That´s even MORE unfair than the current capitalist system. I know some say we shouldn´t compare work with fun, but I believe that where money is involved, we must...

Let me also remind you that the reward pool from the steem blockchain need NOT be the only source of income... advertising and other traditional means could be brought to steemit and interwined with it so that hugely popular streamers can bank on their popularity so that the share they get from the pool don´t drain it too much. That could be implemented without too much hassle as well, and I bet most celebrity streamers wont mind to have that complimentary income since they are using a similar system on youtube.

So, let me recap to be cristal clear: what I´m proposing is in the future using soft caps on what a single celebrity streamer(or blogger) can get from the common reward pool while at the same time introducing advertising and other marketing stuff to compensate them and enabling them additional returns.

Bid Bots

I agree 100% with your asessment on bid bots. They are a necessary evil in the current system for most minnows/dolphins to get noticed and progress. I see contest bots, interactive bots, gaming bots, even applications on top of bots(with the right sdk). The future of bidbots is interesting indeed.

Plagiarism

I belive bots are fine to police the net, it´s human oversight what should be improved. for example, recently, I commited the sin of doing an almost literal translation of an article from english to spanish because I was low on time to chew it and spit it with my own thoughts and ideas(I had to get to real life work). Guess what happened? Steemcleaners flagged me, even though the article in spanish is nowehere on the internet! I took it to #steemabuse-appeals on discord and they said they flagged my post which was unoriginal(which it was indeed, since it was a literal translation), but the case got "dismissed" when the admin promptly abandoned the room, ignoring me after I confronted him to tell me "where does in steemit TOS or even in steemcleaners rules say that literal translations are illegal?". So now I know the other side of the coin: even though plagiarism is a cancer on steemit, I bet that there are a whole lot of people like me who got their posts flagged by a loose cannon bot with a over-zealous algorythm, and the admins arbitrarily decide its ok, even though its nowhere in the rules. The kind of power they wield is not anarchism, its a dictatorship. Anarchism is by definition(and I´m copying from wikipedia here): "belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion."(arbitrary de-monetazation as a form of censorship is a form of FORCE, which btw is already happening all over places like youtube). My article was just a blockchain article but imagine if I were translating a whistleblowing, or even a politcally inclined news article from one language to another. How did we get to the same arbitrary censorship that plague the rest of the networks over HERE ON STEEMIT?

So, we need a solution on both sides. On one side, real plagiarism gotta go, more bots, more finely tuned could do the initial cleaning. Curation teams are doing good work on it as well, since they denounce most spammers. But ultimately, I believe its the repeated offense which should be avoided. But I´m worried about the potential of bots for doing censorship or targeted de-monetization. We should build a TRIBUNAL of appeals, and make a blockchain app that selects random people each week to temporarily conform it so they can vote on keeping the ban or absolving a post, following a strict and well defined set of rules. C´mon people, we got the blockchain technology, lets use it! Placing judge, jury, and executioner power in a single person most of the time prompts that person to make bad or dumb decisions, shady ones, or even to abuse his/her power. The same tribunal could work on cases of repeated offenders which are not caught by the bots, and because it would be composed of random people selected temporarily for a period by an algorythm and their votes legitimized by blockchain, there would be no bias there. What do the guys at @utopian-io and @elear think about that?

Reputation

I really like your solution, I couln´t have said it better.

Let me add some subjects:

DMANIA

While I like the idea of having an app for memes into the steemit blockchain, it ceases to be a good idea when you analyze that while it takes at least an hour(sometimes a few) to properly develop a post for steemit and most of the times it also takes hours to make a video for Dtube, it just takes 10 second to find a random meme, post it in DMANIA, and fill it with bots. It might be my rage talking but I recently got called a copy/paster for TRANSLATING literally an article, and yet I see hundreds of DMANIA memes copied from everywhere on the internet. If that shit is legal, I might be inclined to do it myself. Bah, who am I kidding? I love to produce thought out content, however tons of people will realize sooner or later than spamming the reward pool with memes is way easier than actually having to write or film or draw or take pictures.

My proposed solution: either move DMANIA to its own blockchain and let them grow its own value, or limit the amount of total reward % from the general pool DMANIA can get.

Good content

Curation efforts are fine and dandy, but lots of posts still go unnoticed. After all, just a few curators can´t be everywhere at once. Some good contests with bounties that promote good content are already happening, there are writing and picture taking contests going all on the time, but how about having prizes with categories like "most interesting content of the week", etc. Here´s an idea, the same TRIBUNAL blockchain app could be used to nominate good content and then vote on it on a weekly basis. Millions of eyes could suggest to the tribunal blockchain app content based not on post $, but on post quality. People would be incentivized to write good stuff if they know they could be selected and win a bounty for their good content. Plus, we wouldn´t have to change a thing, that thing could be built on top of steemit as is right now.

Just my 2 cents.