RE: Steemit developer curation experiments, brace yourselfs, major changes are coming
Delegated voting
It wont work to do your idea. There isn't enough human attention in possession of enough Steem Power for that to work.
What they could do is the plan where they delegate the voting power of a whale to a voting pool of regular bloggers. These bloggers could be randomly selected daily or a whale could simply make a list of people to delegate their voting authority to. These voters would get some portion of the profits in exchange for serving in the voting pool.
So you can do it but I don't think the rewards should be messed with, and I don't think the idea of trying to force behaviors out of curators by limiting who they can vote for is good either. What if the curators genuinely like certain content or like certain bloggers? They should be able to do what they want with their Steem Power.
But there is a problem with discovering new bloggers and the only way to improve that is to acquire more attention by renting human computation from a pool of regular bloggers who serve as delegated voting pools for whales. I think bots are a good thing, but I do recognize there is a need to solve the attention scarcity problem among the whales.
There are less 200 high value curators, allowing them to do whatever they with thousands of users posting thousands of blog post is an irresponsible way to run steemit, this is what happens when people fear money, they give away all their power to those who have all the money. Your idea for delegated voting does sound interesting, that could be another experiment to try.
Debating ideas is a waste if time. The right path is to implement them and see what happens. I suggest that you not reject and debate the ideas I propose as you seem to always do, but focus on your own ideas. Accept all the ideas, be open to try them all, and stick with the ones that work.
The way I see it, on one hand you have the scrapping of curation rewards, and on the other, complicated patches that won't actually reduce this problem. Curators really do nothing for the ecosystem anyway, except draw money out for 'inb4' type behaviour. It's not going to work and eventually everyone will see that I am right about this.
I also think that Dan is wrong about negative voting and flagging as well. Disagreeing should be entirely private, and subjective. It is by its very nature contentious and unnecessary. Rubbish will naturally not accrue as much votes, and this automatically lets it fall down. Even negative votes altogether, will not help, this will become a point of conflict, where it is more productive to, rather than downvote what you don't like, upvote what you do, and may the best votes win.
For the authors only. not for voters.
Curators are critical to determine the value of a post.
Hmm spreading out the voting power to willing participants I like this idea.