I consider myself to be a die-hard optimist, but I hate to say that I have all but given up on STINC ever doing anything about the issues plaguing the Steem blockchain and subsequent platform. I have barely been a member for five months, but I learned very quickly how broken this platform is.

When you signup you're told to work hard and eventually you will be rewarded. Admittedly, I have been more fortunate with success than many, but by any measurable means, I am not making a sustainable or boastable sized income on this site.

Occasionally a post I publish might be picked up by a curation trail such as @curie and it'll net me a few SBD. Or if I want to put the effort in, @utopian-io pays out nice rewards for development related posts and contributions such as tutorials and improvements to open source projects.

But as a whole, you have the whales at the top with troves of wealth, reputation and voting power who can make a comfortable living upvoting their own posts either directly or using their network of bot/voting accounts to do so all without engaging with the Steem community.

The problem is Steem doesn't reward participation. What does a whale get for upvoting and commenting on other peoples posts? Maybe a few SBD in curation rewards (if they time it right) or they can make hundreds just upvoting their own content.

One of the most glaringly obvious solutions is to halve the rewards someone gets for upvoting their own content (once they eclipse a certain voting power threshold). And then incentivise high Steem Power/reputation users with better rewards (without rules and timing restrictions) so whales have no choice than to engage or lose 50% of their profits.

I think there is nothing wrong with using bots, particularly those that are operating sensibly and people using them sensibly. But, I think there needs to be some guidelines in place how often a user can use bots to upvote their content. And while it is impossible to stop bots entirely or regulate their use, these bots have public names and maintaining a database wouldn't be that hard to regulate the largest ones.

I have really been looking into Social Media Tokens (SMT's) whenever those end up releasing and I think they're going to have a revolutionary impact on the Steem platform. Essentially an SMT will allow users who want to bring about change to start their own content platforms based on Steem.