Authors get more in reality because most of the rewards go back into the pockets of stakeholders right now. 50% of a large pie is far better than 75% of next to nothing.
I believe abusive post farms and poor quality bid bot posts would likely be a much larger target for free downvotes than posts about controversial subject matters, generally speaking.
How exactly is it a larger pie? Still doesn’t solve the problem of people upvoting their friends because they are friends. Good content will never organically reach the top on this platform unless you figure out a way to completely get rid of self voting and voting rings.
But more than that, there will always be a small group of people who try to minmax any platform and game the system. But as long as there is money to be made then you can’t stay ahead of them. As I see it the only thing this change will do is make it impossible for people to use bots for exposure, at least not without taking a massive hit. So we’ll go back to the small group of cool kids getting their posts constantly upvoted by their cool kid friends, full of unnecessarily positive “great job!” type comments...
Maybe just outlaw bidbots altogether and heavily penalize people who use and operate them. There are always ways around it but this would get rid of most of them for sure and at least make them invisible to most users. Make using bidbots a bannable offense.
But like I said even then that’s not going to solve the problem of people just putting money in their friends pockets instead of actually upvoting good shit.
You're one of the few, but hopefully growing number of people who actually really gets it.
Glad to have you help explain these ideas to everyone
@yallapapi, @trafalgar & @baah,
OK, let's be realistic ... Social Media is so-called because it's Social. Human beings bond with one another and create preference groups based upon familiarity and loyalty. You ARE NEVER going to overcome that and in my opinion you ought not want to because any minor distortions caused to some Theoretical Objective Payout Model (based purely upon quality) is more than offset by the value of creating intense cohesion between millions of overlapping and inter-locking social networks.
Sociality is the tie that binds.
The Spartans understood this: Despite their intense life-long training and legendary discipline, they still found it necessary to group family members together in a Phalanx to ensure its integrity during battle.
Besides, "my friendship abuses" will be largely negated by "your friendship abuses" and from a systemic point of view, everything largely works out in the end. Admittedly, a dozen fat walleted friends circle-jerking would create non-trivial systemic distortions but they could be handled on a case-by-case basis. (I deal with that in my Series of Reform Articles).
Far more problematic than friendship-based "unearned generosity" are bidbots and multiple-account-self-upvoting as they introduce pernicious knock-on effects ... like murdering curation by re-directing the 85% of SP that's owned by Whales and Orcas into alternative SP-leasing to bidbots, etc.
In the end, we will always have an imperfect system (human beings are imperfect inputs and therefore create, unavoidably, imperfect outputs). But as I tell my daughter, "95% is by definition imperfect ... but it still gets you into Harvard."
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Let's get to 95% before we even contemplate about how to get to 100%.
Quill