RE: My take on HF21
Initially, when I heard about the 50/50 proposal I thought, hey that's a bit drastic but at the same time saw how little engagement is left on Steem so a part of me figured no harm in trying and shaking things up cause the current path is going nowhere. I did feel it was too much of a change, 65/35 or 60/40 would have been more prudent, but some feel it isn't enough to make a significant difference to user behaviour, fair enough but as I'm discussing this in public and am receiving feedback from you and others I am realising more and more that steemit.com and other frontends aren't the only game in town, there are many other business models, 50/50 kills fundraising models like fundition and many other business models like yours, so yes I agree with you but I think my voice is in the minority.
Also great to hear that you as a backup witness who has the most to lose are happy to take an inflation cut to save on the content rewards being reduced on its own.
It would be good to run 50-50 on a test net somewhere for 2 months or so and see what happens. Then make a decision based on that. Any professional team with millions of dollars of market cap on the line would run a test first before going to the real thing. (I would think that by definition, upward mobility becomes very difficult with 50/50.) it maybe that we should propose several curation models and let the community choose here. I know this might not be in ur interests, but another incentive to get people curating and encourage more organic content creation would be to penalise users who use bid bots and users who delegate to them, thereby removing enough Steem form each vote to make them uneconomic (we use bid bots all the time by the way - but this is to keep up with the Joneses) in an ideal world, promoted content should result in burned Steem, and not add a selling pressure to the Steem price by redistributing Steem to token holders who do not do anything to add value to the chain.
What ever we decide to do, I propose we test 3-5 options first. That is what any team would do in order to minimise risk to the community and obtain the most clear view. For example, we could run a 25/75 split between author and curator as well. If we could get the content sponsored externally, the best authors could earn rewards additional to Steem rewards and content consumers and whales would be incentivised to review content. This would bring back organic discovery again. But really none of us know what will happen and this puts a lot of risk on a change like this. So I would advise running several test cases for a few months and then let the community decide what it likes before deciding on one particular solution. This will also give businesses adequate time to adjust their models before the change happens. Either way, the community must get organic content discovery going again at the same time we must disincentivise larhe holders from earning rewards unless they are adding value to the chain via supporting projects or setting up large, manual curation teams to properly distribute the wealth to the highest quality content.
I don't think a testnet would be a true representation of what would happen, only a small subset of users would use the testnet and since rewards aren't real on the testnet you can't simulate real human behaviour. I have no issue if bots are no longer the flavour, we have many services, bots however do democratise visibility where anyone can purchase visibility and does not discriminate, I would hate to go back to the days where u have to kiss ass of whales and go cap in hand to try get their vote so you can get your content promoted, I think that is very humiliating.
Yes, this is also tough. One thing is for sure, these days u have to pay a whale for exposure. It just means organic content discovery has gone. There should be voting guilds with many curators and large delegations to solve this issue. But, you are right, every scenario has its down sides, it just depends on which type of down side will result in the most active whales and organic content discovery.