With the current model being a 75/25 splits(which seems to really turn out to be about 12% to 15% a year from upvoting) we already have bidbot posts that are largely nonsense spamming Hot/Trending. Bidbot operators aren't going to stop their services if it turns into a 50% curation rewards, this SHOULD expand.

Free downvotes will do what, you guessed it, cause MORE people to downvote. It won't cause more people to DOWNVOTE SMARTER.(people don't just get more smarterererereresting if you hand them power).

It is important to think of the longterm consequences when making such changes.

Important link https://busy.org/@yabapmatt/hf21-and-the-steem-vision

Obvious problems with 50% curation rewards

Well for starters, we already have a certain number of people who buy Steem just to use it on bidbots to make profit on garbage posts and or upvote themselves on everything they do regardless of it being good content.

NOW there will be an incentive for people to buy Steem and join a curation trail just so they can upvote stuff and earn rewards. This incentive does currently exist, but only earning you 12% to 15%profit per year, while upvoting yourself would earn you 3x that(the 75/25 split). Now that is no longer the case because it will be a 50/50 split, or 24% to 36% profit per year upvoting others or 24% to 36% profit per year upvoting your own posts/comments.

You see the problem right? You don't even need to make your own posts/comments anymore.... Anyone can just buy Steem join a curation trail and make free money by doing nothing. Adding essentially no value. Most curation trails don't have high standards on what they upvote, and frankly it won't matter if you get the same rewards for upvoting someone else than you do for actually taking time to comment/post. This will create a culture of joining curation trails or just auto upvoting posts to get more rewards, regardless of the content or merit.

Bid Bots to the moon + SMT Moony

Making it 50% curation rewards and taking into consideration many bidbot services will use Smart Media Tokens(SMTs) to distribute value(some already are gearing up) it will be more profitable for bidbot services. Instead of getting their 25%(12% to 15% profit a year) curation rewards it is now 50%(24% to maybe 36% depending on many factors) and they will also offer token rewards, of which they will give themselves a bunch and get rich from that. I'm not against giving yourself tokens for a project you are creating, more power to you.

This will create more of an incentive to buy Steem, but for the wrong reasons. Essentially most bidbotted posts are pure trash. Bringing in more bidbotting and more profitable bidbotting just further increases the trash that this platform will get(people specifically paying hundreds of USD to make profit on shitposts/garbage content).

Great!

Free Downvotes = more people being downvoted, NOT smarter downvoting(duh...)

This should be obvious. But apparently to many it isn't. Free downvotes = more people being downvoted.

Currently if you want to downvote someone that is an opportunity cost you make, because for every downvote that is potential earnings you are taking away from yourself via the missted opportunity on upvoting someone. So most people don't currently downvote anything, because they want to continually earn money.

You can see why that incentive is misaligned, as stuff that should be downvoted is usually not downvoted.

SOLUTION!

Voting For "Downvote Mods" or "Downvote Super Users"or "Downvote Curators" or whatever the fuss you wanna call it

We currently vote for witnesses and trust them to do all the Witnessy witnessing stuff they do.

So....Lets vote for the people who get the free downvotes. Projects could be formed or current projects like @steemcleaners or @cheetah or whatever. They could be the ones who actually go through and do the downvoting.

Giving free downvotes to people who are voted on is a much more organized and structured, and their power can be taken away if they are abusing it. Giving free downvotes to everyone is what a child comes up with as a solution.

Resteem and upvote if you would like to help spread this message. I think what I have written is farily good, it could be improved on. Comment below with your improvements.