EDIT: It appears that a new steemit dapp has a workaround solution that effectively partially implements this idea.

My Referral Link: https://steemfollower.com/?r=2078

Allow a 100% Voting Power Vote: The Best Voting Problem Solution.

The Problem and Solution

I think steemit has an obvious content problem: Trending is full of spam articles posted by the same people.

Solution: Let users vote with 100% of their Voting Power instead of a mere 2%

• Why not let patrons give all their voting power to a single work that they really like?
• Why not let people who want to self-promote do that (but with a lot less spam)?
• Why turn-off passive investors who do not want to participate in the social media aspect by forcing them suffer inflation penalties or make 50 spam posts per week?

I have split steam users into broad categories: Authors, Curators, Patrons, Investors. In the following sections I explore how allowing 100% power votes benefits these users and the community as a whole.

Allowing Authors to use all of their SP in a single post greatly reduces spam

It is very difficult to write more than one quality article per week. If an author spends an entire week on an article and wants to back his work with all of his SP he should be allowed to do that, this is a much better alternative than that same author writing several mediocre articles in a week and up-voting those individually. If the article is good the author will get even more SP from patrons and his content will naturally rise to the top.

Authors will probably NOT want to spend all of their SP on themselves because they need to interact with other community members by up-voting their followers comments etc.

Building relationships on the steemit platform is ultimately going to be more profitable than simply 100% up-voting yourself all of the time.

If perspective authors can make a one post per week commitment they are heavily incentive to buy steem. The commitment of fifty articles per week is too great for most prospective steem authors.

the alternative

Any alternative solution can be easily gamed. If you disallow self-voting, authors will form up-voting cadres that in essence are self-voting in disguise. This need not even be explicit, I could just reciprocate an equal amount of up-vote power to anyone who up-votes me, regardless of if I like their content.

There is no solution that can not be gamed other than a laissez-faire approach.

More people will curate because they can make a worthwhile time investment even with a modest amount of steem power.

A simple way to think about curation is if a lot of people vote after you. You will probably make some multiple of the value of your upvote.

An example: If you can perhaps add a early $0.1 upvote and the post is very successful you might make a 300% return on that upvote (~$0.30). (Assuming a lot of voting power follows yours)

That’s fine, but very few will actively look for good content to get that $0.30. If you are allowed to make one $5 upvote a week instead of fifty $0.10 upvotes then you can make $15 for your curation, which will incentivize a ton of people to look for good content.

When good content is promoted more people will want to buy steem and the price will go up.

When a modest amount of steem can earn people good curation rewards people will want to buy steem to take a shot at curation rewards for themselves.

the alternative

Only whales can curate. They are the only ones who can make a powerful enough upvote to justify the time sink of finding content. However whales are by definition millionaires who value their time very highly and probably don't care to spend it curating.

Investors won't have to make fifty spam posts per week to maximize their investment

Investors would be able to make a single comment once per week and basically negate the 10% inflation.

This might appear as a negative to some, but I think it is a massive positive. First, there are many investors who do this anyway, but by spamming 50 comments a week. Second, if we are welcoming to investors who do not necessarily want to participate heavily in the social media aspect, this will increase the price of steem. The price increase actually will theoretically exactly offset the reward pool loss.

the alternative

Turn off many investors who would feel jipped if they don’t spend the time making fifty comments per week to maximize their returns.

Will this cause everyone to spend all their voting power on themselves

No! You would have to assume that 0% of the user base fit in the patron catagory.

Conclusion

I have outlined how every member of the community: investors, authors, curators, and patrons benefit from allowing 100% power votes.

Limiting how users can use their SP creates problems where people can game the system. A more straight forward approach of giving people free reign on how to use their SP is the best solution. The increase to a 2% max was largely seen as a positive change by the community. So perhaps we should keep going in that direction and increase to a 10% max in an upcoming hard fork with plans to eventually increase to 100% if we continue to see positive impacts in community behavior.