Hi @blocktrades

Interesting proposals, thanks for taking the time to key this down.

...I don’t think it should be profitable to pay for an upvote if other curators don’t see the quality of your post and follow through with upvotes of their own.

I'll pick this paragraph as I think it's one that all will agree on. This would mean a change, like the one @minnowbooster has made where you cannot vote a post earlier than 15 minutes using their service.

With the dr Otto bots, it's currently just a case of planning post submission around the bigger bidbots voting schedule. And so do these bots need an ethical code change too?

Taken from a reply below.

But nowadays the root problem of curation is related to the small number of actively working human curators with enough SP to impact a post's performance and I think this can directly be traced back to the fact that it is not very profitable to curate.

This is where I think delegated Steem Power has the potential be amazing.

Yourselves and Minnowbooster offer rates that make it unprofitable to buy SP and use ethically. This forces the buyer to not curate, but to sell votes and self vote.

The options are:

• reduce pricing (some have given 0 fee delegation) and monitor who you delegate to (we can help)

• change the rewards mechanism to increase curation rewards.

10000 SP will produce curation rewards of around 20SP weekly.

This amount of SP will cost 133 STEEM A WEEK from MB and your pricing is comparable I believe.

Clearly, a (code) change from 25 - 50% curation isn't going to do a lot to fill this gap - we need 500% curation rewards to profit from a lease!

I'll end this by saying, thank you to all who are delegating Steem Power for absolutely nothing - you will be known as the saviours of Steem.