Steem is an echo chamber of circlejerkers who conspire to upvote each other's shitposts and most of the social networking does not even happen on the blockchain but on shady discord channels and other 3rd party chat apps.

I don't think changing author/curation rewards will affect any hopeful changes that proponents argue such as reducing bidbot profits or increasing curation. Most who have been here for some time already game the system with multiple accounts to maximize personal profits. We could end up driving away quality authors by reducing their rewards. Downvoting is a poison that will end this experiment quicker than anything else.

People who have used the system for too long are unable to see the issues preventing new users from investing in steem power. Instead of focusing so much on the power users who have already established themselves and are using the blockchain as an income stream, we should be asking new and non-users what can we do to make their experience better.

There are some major flaws with the status quo that have been mentioned too many times by people that have joined the platform and already left. For example finding new authors who produce quality content is almost impossible by wading through the trash on trending, hot, or new. There is nothing like multi-reddit or twitter lists for people to create filtered content streams of their interests and find new quality authors to upvote, which should be easy enough for a multimillion dollar company like Steemit Inc. to produce. Powering down should not take 13 weeks, it's a ridiculous arbitrary time-period that gives the whole plaform the feel of a ponzi scheme. Posts should not be limited to 7 day payouts, it's another ridiculous arbitrary time-period that contributes more to spam than anything else. I understand the need to have some sort of payout period, but this could easily reset each week or use existing strategies such as creating a comment on the post with 100% beneficiary reward to author. Users should have freedom to spend their voting power however they see fit. If they want to spend their entire 7 day vote on a single post they should be allowed to do that. This would largely end the problem of dust votes and allow small investors to actually contribute to their favorite authors.