Even if I had made twice as much vote farming under the current system, it wouldn't make up my investment being down $4m from its heights. I doubt freedom's vote selling has made up for the $40m he's lost, and this basically applies to every large stakeholder participating. This is partly due to a crypto bear market but partly due to a completely dysfunctional platform.

We want to change the system to align selfish profit maximizing individual behavior with behavior that will benefit the entire system. It's true that many stakeholders refrain from vote farming: some are too wealthy to care, some risk losing more in lost reputation if they're leaders in other communities/projects, some are lazy, and some are truly just nice altruistic people. But what you don't do is design an economic system that relies on overwhelming altruism and fails in its absence. We don't ask people to be less greedy, if that had worked, this economic system would be doing wonders by now. People generally aren't in crypto to be altruistic.

The idea is simple: have an economic system that doesn't reward vote farming 4x more than contributing to the system through good content curation. Make it reward the behavior we want to see on here as competitively as vote farming. So we increase curation, but we can't do it to the point where all incentive to produce content stops, so we try to make up the remaining difference in other ways like increasing downvoting incentives by making a certain amount of them free.

How will these changes effect my own behavior? Great question. Instantly I anticipate all these farm posts will be knocked down to shit from downvotes which are now free to cast. And they don't need to be knocked down to 0 to deter me, just 30-40% and I'll go looking for quality content to upvote because curation now pays 50%, and if I do it well I'll likely get even more.

But not just me, everyone! The idea isn't to kick the shit out of me or kevin or haejin or freedom or any other stakeholder for the crime of pursuing our rational self interests under a broken economic system and losing everyone, especially ourselves a ton of money in the process. The idea is to fix that economic system so it compels us to behave in a way that contributes to the system if we want to maximize our individual returns. Farm posts like mine will be hit by downvotes, bid bot posts will similarly be hit. Curation will become the dominant form of returns of stakeholders. Content creators will be happy because they're now truly getting the rewards and exposure good content deserve, because people like me would vote of them as it gets us the most money now. And 50% of a huge pie is a lot better than 75% of next to nothing for the authors.

I don't want to vote farm because it's boring and it's shit. I haven't wanted to ever and have been speaking out about the economics here since the start of the year. But I can't afford not to if it just means losing stake to those who do, and it's not their fault either because this economic system is insanely stupid and they're likely just in the same position as me. If you want to truly change this system, it's obvious: don't reward vote farming 4x as much. Reward the behavior you want to see most on the system with the highest returns. It really is that simple.

Edit: why would I be attempting to introduce any changes for so long if I just want the good times to go on, as some have been implying? It's not like any other system can reasonably lend itself to higher mindless vote farming returns.