Subject of the day, week, and if we're not careful, of the month - curation.
Here's the alternative I support, instead of the 50/50% reward split change, built into the blockchain core.
Changes at a higher level than the blockchain-level, with a potential probable better effect.
Just as blockchain-level sensible changes should not be rolled out over night, this solution takes time too.
The advantage? It improves user experience greatly, something a change to the reward system doesn't.
The solution I see, and from yesterday's post you might've read there are others thinking the same way, is that curation can be improved by changes to the user interface. I'm not talking here about Steemit in particular, I'm talking about all major DApps.
Some of these changes are relatively easy to implement, but I think it's wise that DApp developers should wait for Hivemind to benefit of a layer above the blockchain-level, that would improve the user experience in itself, where that is possible, at the expense of missing real-time updates from the blockchain. At least that's how I perceive Hivemind.
The major boost in curation can be obtained by the way the information (posts, comments) are presented and organized.
Personalized and with multiple options to re-organize it!
User interfaces (DApps) should be the ones to determine the Trending Pages, those should not be determined at the blockchain level. The trending page from Busy can be completely different from the one at Steemit.com and not the same as the one from SteemPeak, to mention only general-purpose condensers.
Multiple trending pages, each with its own set of rules, harder to game them all. By the way, since we are here, Google never really solved the gaming of its' search engine algorithm until it made it private and fuzzy enough so no one knows for sure what the rules are. Not that I'm advocating for making these rules private, but I'm saying that as long as those rules (or others) are known, they will be gamed.
Let's expand on the first idea too.
Everyone has their feed. But on that feed, people often read the posts of certain authors. Those authors should become favorite and be listed first, by default.
Tags should be reordered by the personal preference (what you read, what you write, custom), and not by the awkward general usage.
Another order (the more relevant the better) can be selected by user at any time.
All these elements should become more and more customizable.
The same about ordering comments. Wouldn't it be a great idea to list first the comments of your most loyal followers, those whom you replied to and upvoted their comments in the recent days/past?
Or an advanced filter, with multiple conditions?
And of course, since we are on Steem and we don't like Facebook so much, a switch in settings to turn off and forget your preferences in the respective DApp. Which you can turn it on again whenever you'd like.
Do you think people would engage more/vote more manually under these conditions? More than a 50/50% reward split change? Less? The same?