Where there is a finite pool of rewards shared among many participants, there are conflicts based on their distribution.
It's unavoidable.
The pool is finite. And our scarcity mindset leads us to react when someone takes a bigger share from the pool than he or she should have, thus leaving less for the rest of us.
And yet we dream to develop a world of abundance. It's interesting how we started doing that by creating a coin - the first of its kind - that is by definition scarce.
@blocktrades posted at the beginning of December last year a Roadmap for Hive-related work by Blocktrades in the Next 6 months. He explained there the changes they want to implement, some slated for HF25, others being rolled out as they are finished because they don't affect consensus.
He also explained the situation with HMTs and what is their position on them.
But for this post I want to focus on the change that will affect curation:
Change 5min vote window to longer window and provide proportional rewards during the window
Firstly, why did they think it's necessary?
Currently, voting earlier than 5 minutes after a post is published results in less curation rewards for the voter. This led to the rise of auto-vote bots that vote at or near the end of this 5 minute window, severely disadvantaging manual voters.
What will the change accomplish?
With this change, there will no longer be a penalty for early voting of a post/comment. Furthermore, there will be no advantage to voting earlier than anyone else who votes within the new longer time period.
There will still be an advantage for voters who vote within the time window, but the idea is that the new window time should be long enough for manual curators to find good content, putting them on equal footing with the vote bots.
How long will the proposed window be? That's what blocktrades thought in December:
I’d argue for somewhere between 2 hours and 24 hours at most. I generally favor it being closer to 2 hours, to allow for some friendly competition between manual voters, and to encourage somewhat rapid curation that brings good content to the trending page quicker.
How will this modification change the rapport between automated and manual votes?
This change isn’t expected to eliminate auto-vote bots, but it should remove the financial incentive to use an auto-vote bot instead of voting manually.
Is this modification aimed at eliminating autovotes?
This change will still lead to an incentive to select “popular” content, since voters during the first 2 hours will gain somewhat more rewards than later voters on a post.
The above means that “Smart” auto-vote bots will likely begin trailing successful manual curators by voting near the end of the 2 hour period in an attempt to maximize their rewards. On the whole, this incentive seems beneficial, since it should lead to good manual curation being the guiding force for how the bots vote as well.
To me this seems pretty well thought without going into complicated changes that might disrupt the voting system entirely.
The question is: will this system be gamed as well? Possibly. The motivation lies in the rewards with monetary value and in our scarcity mindset.
However, the proposal seems much more fair to manual curators, in my opinion.
If the thoughts expressed by blocktrades in the last quote will become true, it will give the manual curators instead of preset autovotes the power to set trends.
The distribution itself might become better. With an improved distribution, maybe we'll have fewer conflicts based on rewards. We already have fewer than during Steem time, or I'm no longer aware of most of them. There we had epic whale wars, some ongoing, some every few months. With collateral victims, as in all wars.
And in the end, maybe we'll make one more step towards the age of abundance.