The ideal of Steem is to reach a system where people earn the currency by using their brain (also called proof-of-brain as states the bluepaper). The more brain, the more rewards. This is the power that makes STEEM valuable and appreciated, and we must preserve and keep this principle very high.
However, in recent days we see people abusing self-voting, and also small groups voting in a circle way to themselves without taking into account the content of the post. I'm not saying that self-voting or voting rings are bad at all (there are cases where this practice is fine). The problem comes when people get used to this (especially whales), then the competition to get a vote is lost, and that is why the creation of good content is discouraged. And as I said earlier, we must preserve the good content, the proof-of-brain.
Proposal
We can not impose that the vote to be distributed among 1000 different accounts, this would be very restrictive and unpopular. But I think that a fair number is distributing the vote among at least 20 people, meaning no more than the 5% of our voting power for each account.
Each user will have 20 "resistances" that represents the amount of voting power spend in a particular user. For instance, Alice has a voting power at 100%. If she votes Bob the voting power is reduced 2%. This 2% is added to one resistance called "Bob". When this resistance is above 5% the worth of the vote is reduced proportionally to this percentage.
And how is the percentage of each resistance reduced? The same amount added to one resistance must be subtracted from the remaining 19 resistances. In other words, the 20 resistances represents the distribution of our votes.
I know it is difficult to visualize at first glance. For this reason, I have created a very intuitive simulator where you can understand it directly.
Simulator - spread the vote
As you can see, when I use more than 5% of my voting power with the same author, the resistance bar turns yellow, and the worth of the vote is reduced a little bit for that author. While I distribute my votes among more people, these bars are reduced in percentage and the value of the vote remains intact.
Benefits
- Voting rings and self-voting are reduced.
- The computational cost is small since only 20 counters should be added for a user, no more.
- It is easy to implement on the blockchain, as you can see in the simulator.
Another proposal
Finally, I want to point out that @smcaterpillar proposed a similar system, with the difference that there is a voting power (regenerated by time) for each author you vote, and it is halved every time the curator votes for the same author. Details here.
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors