I’m not going to disagree with the numbers, because what you’ve presented is probably accurate. I just don’t necessarily agree with the notion that behavior won’t change.

In my opinion, the idea behind 50/50 has more to do with demand for STEEM and powering it up (what we might call “investing”). Making it more lucrative to hold SP for added “profits” on curation rewards is something that we really need to focus on, considering the fact that most social media users are not “authors” - they are consumers of content. The ability to earn a larger percentage of rewards for discovery and ranking of content not only benefits the consumer earning the curation rewards, but it benefits those who are truly “authors” of popular content.

This isn’t about bid-bots and self-voters. It’s about attracting and rewarding the massive number of non-authors into the ecosystem to do the work of actually curating the authors. If done properly, this would be a boon to authors, as the potential increased adoption and buying of STEEM would be reflected on STEEM prices and the profits that the authors would receive when cashing out.

And to that point - the authors who are blogging in order to “get paid” (and cash out to realize their gains) need more buyers on the other side in order to maintain their profits. Who’s going to continue buying the perpetual cashout? If increasing rewards for content consumers (SP holders) is attractive enough, we potentially receive a much larger increase in consumers (SP holders) that may entirely counteract the selling authors.

Of course, this is not THE solution to bid-bots, self-voters, and a long list of other problems, but it certainly points things in a better direction. If bid-bots are a concern, there’s one solution that could effectively kill or greatly reduce their existence and profitability:

Remove the delegation protocols.

But nobody wants to do that, let alone recognize it as the single largest cause of the current anti-social behavior on the platform (with low daily vote targets and linear rewards being the other contributing factors).

So...we have solutions for problems. But is anyone willing to actually address and change them? Not likely. I’ll support whatever changes get us closer to a better overall system and I believe 50/50 rewards does that - and is actually “fair” to both classes of users (producers and consumers). I would prefer even higher curation rewards, but 50/50 is where it should have been left back in 2016 when it was originally changed to 75/25...for what was likely horrible reasons at the time, when the user base was much smaller and nothing had a chance of working as intended due to that and some other issues.