Do Away With The Reverse Auction In Curation

There has been a lot of talk pro and con the Economic Improvement Proposal by Steemit Inc. A separate pool of free downvotes is an issue heatedly debated as well as the split between author and curation rewards. Penalizing very small rewards ostensibly to combat spam, plagiarism etc. is another divisive issue.

But there one thing I have never seen anyone question and that is how curation rewards drastically depend on the timing of the vote and the order in which the votes are cast. I understand that the point of all that is to encourage curators to be first to find "gems" are that are going to receive a lot of votes on account of their "high quality". In light of what we have seen for the last three years, that's a joke. The presupposition is that most curators aren't going to adjust their behavior based on how other curators vote. What a lot of people do is maximize their curation rewards by setting those authors on carefully timed auto-vote whose posts can be expected to receive a lot of valuable upvotes. In fact, the most lucrative posts to "curate" would be posts promoted to Trending using bid bot stacking. The free downvotes are supposed to counter that. But I don't think a lot of people will bother.

May I suggest a simple solution. Do away with the reverse auction where curators are prepared to take an early upvote penalty depending on how big upvotes they're able to front run by doing so. The curation game is heavily gamed at present. There are tools out there for people to help them front run each other and gain an edge. In some cases, the content itself is a mere afterthought. That clusterfuck was supposed to motivate content discovery. I find it a complete and utter waste of time. The system is not incentivizing curators to find previously unknown superior quality content because the mere act of upvoting something is hardly helpful if most other curators aren't going to see it in the first place. Yes, you can resteem an obscure quality post but if your blogroll is mostly resteemed posts, then you're unlikely to interest anyone or to be successful on the social media side of things, which is vital if you want to gather a following.

Curation rewards should depend on exactly one thing: voting power used by the curator. Other votes should play no part whatsover in it. That's how you completely remove any financial incentive to upvote shit just because your goal is to front run other content-agnostic "curators" who are curation reward maximizers like yourself.

When it comes to content discovery, front ends - and Steemit in particular, would do well to show users content that has been curated already by non-profit seeking curators like @curie or @photofeed based on tags - or any curators once the system has been up and running for a while. Put that content in front of curators with stake and they will upvote it if they enjoy it once the incentive to maximize curation rewards through the front running game or circle jerking has been removed.