I wrote this comment as a response to @blocktrades post:
@blocktrades/proposal-reduce-hive-inflation-by-reducing-curation-rewards
And it was long. So I decided to publish it as a separate post.
Enjoy!
If automatic voting is bad for the network, why do large stakeholders do it?
Stakeholders use automatic voting because:
(1) It takes less time (compared to manual curation).
(2) They earn more money (due to the 5 minute curation period).
Solutions:
Flat curation
Tacking problem (2) first - bring in flat curation. So that it no longer matters when you vote on a post or how large the post value is when you vote on it. All curators will get 50% irrespective of their voting choice (as long as they avoid poor content that is downvoted).
Empower manual curation
Then tackle problem (1) by encouraging users to empower the manual curation communities like @ocd, @curie etc. Users delegate their stake to the curation community. In return they receive a proportional share of the curation rewards from the community; this will be the exactly-the-same-50% that they could get from using an autovoter or manually curating themselves.
Pay manual curators
Allow curation communities to reward their curating teams by upvoting their posts or comments. This will need to be done in a transparent fashion and there should be an agreed limit that curation teams state in their delegation requests. In effect this takes the curation team salary out of author rewards. An alternative would be to use the DAO fund with curation communities applying for small amounts of funding.
To avoid an over-concentration of power in a few curation communities, encourage other specialised communities to put forwards curation teams. Or individuals with good track records.
Get some real rewards out there
Get some real trending posts going by having a weekly contest under which the top curation communities all agree to upvote the best three posts of the week (as voted on by their own curators based on the delegated stake of the community etc etc).
Make it easier to find good posts
Make it easier to find good posts by having a front-end which collates all the posts voted on by the curation communities (and allows you to filter only those curation communities which you prefer).
This should also help prevent abuse by curation teams and ensure no return to poor quality posts with paid-for-votes.
Large stakeholders who do not want to delegate their stake could instead just look at this front-end and pick a number of posts from those which have already been voted-up by communities (in addition to their own preferred authors or communities they support). With flat curation these large stakeholders are not penalised by voting late or voting last.
CONCLUSION
It's a very simple set of changes with almost no coding required - just the flat curation change.
It does put the (hive) power into the hands of a smaller number of curators - but the idea would be that these curators are the ones who are actively curating to find the best posts.
It would remove any need for automated voting, would pay manual curators, would make it easier for (large) stakeholders to find and upvote quality posts without being penalised and could generate the kind of large payouts that would incentivise authors to create posts that are worthy of large payouts. Plus the marketing that these large payouts generate.
It doesn't solve the final issue of auto-voting, which is their use by authors that are in a circle-of-voting. But who is going to put the bell on that cat? Maybe the newly empowered curation communities? An argument for another day.