I want to share my opinion on this proposal, even if I'm a bit late to do so.

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The proposed changes are said to be primarily an attempt to combat self-voting and bidbot usage. I would like to share my reasons for being skeptical of this claim.

Self-voting is not a problem.

People have been self-voting since the beginning - including many members of the Steemit team. It's only a really a problem when the weight of the vote surpasses the perceived value of the post, and especially so when it greatly surpasses it. If someone has earned or invested STEEM, and have posted something of value, then I have no problem with them utilising their stake to upvote said post - and neither should you. After all, according to the whitepaper, the reward pool was intended to be dispersed among the best contributors on the platform, and providing great content is a worthy contribution.

Consequently, I think making changes in order to address a problem that's not a problem, is silly. And I do not think that silly people are at the helm of this ship, so I distrust the claim that this is even the goal in mind.

Bidbots could have been stopped a long time ago, without a hardfork.

If Steemit Inc was against bidbots, then I understand not why the hardfork prior to the inception of bidbots served to create the climate, and the distraction necessary in order to give bidbots an opportunity to thrive before we even knew what had happened. By the time our vote power normalised, we found, as a community, that we had largely become dependent upon bidbots. Futhermore, many members of the community openly and loudly decried the use of bidbots, many of whom suffered flags or worse because of it. If Steemit Inc had wanted the bidbots to be gone, then at that point, they should not have remained silent on the issue, which amounted at the time to implied consent.

If Steemit Inc had posted during this time and informed the community that the use of bidbots is counterproductive to the alleged goals of fairly distributing STEEM across the network; if they had spoken up to the community, and told them that by using bidbots, we would be disincentivising many of the largest stake holders from voting on good content; and if they had warned that repeated usage of bidbots would lead to the concentration of influence into the hands of a small portion of the community, and lead to a potential monopoly on the network; then the majority of the community would have listened, and the few that remained using the bidbots wouldn't have been able to convince themselves that what they were doing was acceptable. Additionally, had they have done that, the bidbots would have made so much less that the largest stake holders would have returned to curating content to maximise their rewards.

Based upon my observation, the solutions we have been historically told are being addressed by hardforks, often have not been. And instead, we've found that with many of them, new avenues of abuse, far too often ones that reverse the distribution of influence over the network, have opened up.

Consequently, I am forced to question the agenda behind this proposal, and I really think that more should too.

To be frank, I do not understand the changes being proposed well enough to conceptualise what abuses may follow, and therefore what the real agenda may be - supposing I am right to distrust the proposed one.

But, what I am able to offer, is a different solution, to many of Steemit's problems. One that would undoubtedly take a lot of work, but that would be more likely to eradicate a large portion of the abusive voting that has plagued Steemit since the early days.

A Different Proposal

For starters, make a change that would remove the visibility of a post's votes and current payout, until someone voted on it(only once you have voted on it personally could you then see how much the post has already made)- or until the upvote period was complete. For the final 12 hours - the downvote only period - have the payout stats become visible, in case the community then wants to remove some of those rewards.

For voting correctly on content, allow users to earn a larger share of curation rewards. But do not allow a user to unvote after they voted, because they noticed that not many others had voted on it. Make it so that there is a box that comes up saying "are you sure you want to vote on this" so no one can act like they voted on something accidentally.

On top of this, to incentivise voting on the best content, rather than content one expects to be doing well, and to offer new users a chance to earn if their work is deserving of it, create a section of the site where a user can gain the opportunity to earn as high as 50% curation rewards for voting on a random stream of content within a predetermined(and extensive) list of tags.

To further explain, there would be a section of the site where one can vote on random content, within their favourite tags. After selecting say "funny" as a tag, a random active post will appear on the screen, with an arrow on the right that allows the viewer to skip to the next random post if they do not like the current one. For voting on content discovered in this fashion, curation rewards are increased dramatically, ensuring that even a new user with zero followers, but exceptional content, will have a much greater chance of not only receiving rewards, but gaining followers. This will not only incentivise fair voting, but it will do wonders for user retention.

I am not an expert, and these suggestions are merely a starting point for better minds to take and build upon. But I find them to be valuable suggestions for several reasons.

People only turned to and continue to use bidbots because so many of the largest stakeholders no longer bother to vote on content, so if you want to earn a lot, then bidbots are necessary for most to accomplish that. These changes would give anyone with good content a chance of earning whale votes, and consequently, I believe, many would stop using bidbots knowing that they have a chance to earn without them.

Secondly, content discovery is rather poor on Steemit. It can take quite some time to find a post that one finds truly interesting and wants to comment upon. The random content discovery will make the process of discovering new content, and new authors, more fun, and more rewarding with the %50 curation rewards.

Also, hiding the current payouts will be a benefit for many reasons. People will stop copy-voting, piling their upvotes onto posts that already have a lot of upvotes in the hopes of earning curation rewards. Authors too will be less demotivated by seeing their excellent post on 0.02 cents while having to look at shitposts on 200 dollars or more. It will also encourage people to actually read what they are voting on, to discern whether it truly is worthy of a vote, because much of the votes cast by users are on work they've not even consumed.

The changes I have proposed would inspire authors to dramatically up the quality of their work in order to maximise the chances of getting a large payout.

While I believe I have left out some of the details that are beyond my ability to understand, such as writing an algorithm that perhaps ensures that, while in the random section, the most voted content (within the random section) shows up more often to people viewing discovering content in that fashion, so too would unseen posts and unvoted ones get thrown into the mix often enough that everyone has a fair chance of getting their work seen and appreciated. Also, there are undoubtedly subtleties needed to be incorporated into the curation rewards when voted upon content organically. Subtleties that are beyond my understanding or ability to explain.

However, I am not providing these suggestions as a "do this now and everything will be fixed." I think that these suggestions are merely a starting point.

In closing.

Self voting is not a problem. Overpaid posts and comments are. The way to get rid of bidbots, that aren't even that profitable as far as I know anyway, is to instil within every author the belief that their post has a chance of earning a whale vote if it is good enough. If enough people can be turned away from bidbots, the influencers will return to voting on content organically or through delegations to curation trails in order to ensure they are still making complete use of their stake. This will start a cycle of more people earning, and less needing bidbots, until they are no longer needed at all. User retention on this site is poor and this needs to be resolved if STEEM has any chance of mass adoption.

The current proposal does not, to me, seem as though it will solve any of these problems. It seems sooner to be something that will drive even more new users away from the platform, and encourage large-stake holders to vote upon the same dolphins repeatedly.

If you find value in these suggestions then I ask that you resteem this post so that the right eyes can look upon them and improve them. Steemit is the community, and we need to start making changes that helps the entire community, not a handful.