Well, @ned made several delegations of $500k recently, IIRC, and but one of the delegates didn't begin self-voting or selling votes, and kudos to @surpassinggoogle for that.

So, he withdrew the delegations to all but @surpassinggoogle, and is now considering (so I hear) making more, but smaller delegations.

https://steemit.com/voteselling/@stellabelle/dear-freedom-and-whales-here-s-a-sp-delegatee-menu-to-solve-the-vote-selling-problem

[full disclosure: I was nominated for a delegation in that post. This may make you suspect that I am biased. I have not received a delegation, so you can dispel that suspicion.]

Such small delegations might reward a self-voter with up to $5/day, far less incentive to self-vote than the $500/day @ned's original delegations made possible.

One of the recipients of these $5k delegations has voted over 1000 times in the last week (nearly 1200 IIRC). If those votes were worth $.10, then since the median post payout was $.01 for the last month, each of those votes was potentially ten times more than the author might have generally expected from a post.

That such small votes are an order of magnitude larger than most people receive for their entire post is telling that the problem of distribution is terrible for new users.

It also shows that moderate delegations to the stake of many curators can deeply impact krill, and perhaps affect retention.

$5M in such delegations would allow 1k curators to impact up to 10k accounts with 100% upvotes each day, with up to 50 times the author rewards krill receive currently per post.

This is a significant improvement over current distribution, and would be likely to strongly impact user retention.

However, @fulltimegeek and @stellabelle did not make these delegations for a fee. They are perhaps not seeking anything other than to improve the platform. If this effort improves user retention, then that should put upward price pressure on Steem, potentiating capital gains for investors.

I reckon this is an effective and promising experiment.