Since July last year, most users of the STEEM blockchain (that is you) have enjoyed a vastly greater vote weight than they would have been used to. This is the result of Hardfork 19, named 'Equality', which changed the shape of the rewards curve from n^2 to n. The effect is that your upvote value is now linearly proportional to your vote weight - one whale with 100,000 SP has the same vote weight as a combined 10,000 minnows with 10 SP each. Previously, that was not the case, with the whale in the hypothetical scenario posed vastly outweighing the minnows. I think this was a good change to the system.
Illustration of n vs n^2 weight. Axis values are illustrative only. Minnows exist on the left, whales on the right.
What the platform is now dealing with is a new problem altogether. We have witnessed a meteoric rise in the value of STEEM and SBD - and yes, it is meteoric, more than a lifetime of compound interest would have yielded in your bank. As a result, we are seeing increasing numbers of people trying to game the rewards system for short term gains through selfupvotes, vote buying, etc. This is folly, especially for the larger whales. They would be far better off nurturing the platform to increase the value of their principle holdings.
The divide between whales who support short term gains through various methods, and those who do not, has resulted in flag wars that frequently fill the Trending page. Yet, assuming two whales have equal weight, it takes a whale protecting the platform their full vote power to cancel out a whale trying to bleed the platform dry. In other words, if one user with 100,000 SP only upvotes themselves to make quick bank, another whale with 100,000 SP needs to use all their voting power to cancel out this abuse.
I would like to see a change made to the flagging power of users, returning flag power to an exponential n^2 curve while maintaining a linear rewards curve. This allows big whales to more effectively 'police' the platform that they are so heavily invested in, as one flag can cancel out a much larger upvote (or many smaller upvotes). This might encourage more whales to start flagging as well, as it takes less of their voting power to address any abuse they come across. Lets face it - most of us would much rather spend the majority of our voting power upvoting, rather than flagging.
Maybe an n^2 flag weight curve is not even the best solution, and a system could be suggested that factors in the total number of votes, pageviews, etc. While all of these are easily gamed individually, collectively they would take a lot of effort to circumvent, which would be immediately obvious to any observer.
What do you think about a non-linear flag curve, coupled with the current linear rewards curve?