RE: Growing Steem to its full potential
Identity and Reputation
Steem system is already quite complicated and this would add more layers to it. If a good reputation would give more voting power, does that mean that the user would get more Steem Power? If yes, then the reputation system would be a redistribution of funds.
Proxy Voting
I'm not sure if this would be a good thing. We need more active users – who use their own accounts – rather than investors who just want to make money and optimize their revenue. Unique active users are those people who build the community and make Steem flourish.
If Steem becomes successful, investors will get enough profit from growth of market cap and price of steem.
Curators
I think it's enough if we make new users to understand that Steem Power and voting power are the same thing. Currently new users don't necessarily get any kind of understanding of the system when they sign up.
If Steem was a game, Steem Power would be one of the most important things to have, if not the most important. There should be clear explanation for new users what Steem Power is and how they can get it more.
Posters
One important thing to make clear to new content creators is that they might need to create their own audience. If there is not enough people to vote for them, they have to become ambassadors of Steem and try to get more users to create accounts that will like their content.
This shouldn't be too difficult if a writer has already a successful blog. They already have a big audience, all that is needed is to convince them to create account in Steem and vote.
Thank you for the good input! You make some strong arguments. However, I think you are not seeing clearly the massive improvement proxy voting could lead to.
Identity and Reputation
We agree. That is why we believe so strongly in proxy voting, because it would allow Identity and Reputation to be implemented at the application layer instead of in the protocol.
Proxy Voting
The brilliance of proxy voting is that the stakeholder would, rightfully, retain the power over her own steem power, but has the option to temporarily distribute this power to other users according to her own formula. Let's say we have 10 whales with different ideas, who are also looking to be entrepreneurs in the space. They could test out 10 different ways of distributing votes to their own user base. Now THAT is horizontal scaling. Let the free market decide which formula works best! For example, we at BitSpace could get an investor involved, buy up a good chunk of STEEM and use that STEEM to establish a flourishing community according to rules that we set ourselves. We could test out reputation and/or identity systems at the application level, and use that with proxy voting to find better ways of curating content efficiently.
Today that is not an option. Our new users could vote their hearts out, but the yield for the users would be close to zero.
Curators
Unfortunately, the way it works now, a new user has close to zero voting power. There is almost no point in voting, unless you buy some STEEM power first. That is not a good way to attract new users. Give normal users the voting rights over whale power (through proxy voting), and suddenly you can have fresh curators with meaningful power in the system.
Posters
While this might work, we believe that proxy voting and the parallel development and horizontal scaling implications have a high chance of establishing voter formulas that will yield better and more fair rewards for the posters.