Some thoughts on curation rewards and voting bots

Steem is still very young and doesn't have a large userbase. How does that affect things? We have only a handful of content creators that bots are following.

But dynamics might be totally different when there are tens or hundreds of great writers. If users are voting 20-50 times per day at most, predictability of popular content will be much harder. If strategic voter (with bot) has decided to vote only 20 times and there are 100 possibly popular posts, it will be very hard for bots to forecast best content.

Maybe best way to deal with current situation would be paying more for content creators and less for curators. After all, there are so few good writers here at the moment that it's not difficult to find their writings. So it's kind of useless to pay for voting for them right now. We should be rewarding more content creators so that there is bigger incentive to join Steem. Maybe something like 75 % to author and 25 % to voters?

My suggestion is that we don't do any drastic changes yet. But it's good that Dan and others are thinking about this. There should be plan B, and preferably also C and D. If the current system fails, we can easily adopt something better. But we can't yet understand all the dynamics because lack of users, lack of content creators and very unequal distribution of Steem Power. After July 4 we probably have much better understanding of behavior of users in this system so we can make better decisions then.

We could also try to install a culture that makes operating bots more difficult.

Writers don't need to write only great posts. They can use Steem as a social media and post sometimes something irrelevant, like a picture of today's breakfast. Bots will waste their votes on those posts, because they are not going to earn that much money because real humans are not going to vote for them.

Voters can be more aware of the situation and not to vote on posts that already have lots of votes (by bots).

Voters can discriminate against users who are operating a bot.