I think these are all important questions, and I'd been working up to a post that was providing some solutions to exactly this issue.

To use the term "solve" this issue, I think would be a bit strong, but can we dramatically improve it? Absolutely. In short it's on application developers primarily and the largest stakeholders secondarily, and the general userbase last.

There unfortunately is also no "We need to do "this"" That is a simple answer. It's a complex problem that will have complex solutions, and of course that's a challenge on a decentralized system where everyone isn't working towards the same goals and everyone doesn't agree on the proper solutions.

On app devs

As the PeakD team has recently done, I think all applications need to create easy to use "tipping" functionality, then this needs to be expanded into even more features that promote people supporting each other with LIQUID Hive.

Along with that we have to continue to chip away at making it easier and easier for a user to buy liquid Hive, with I suppose Hive getting listed on Coinbase being our current holy grail for this. Of course what would be better is a button at the top of all interfaces or apps that says "Buy Hive" and someone clicks it, and buys Hive with their credit/debit card. I know that's pretty hard here currently.

If tipping is integrated across the board and added to the api so that apps can easily access that information, it can be used for better content discovery. So you could sort by best tipped for instance.

This could also help us use ALL the content on the blockchain to draw in eyeballs. The truth is, there is a ton of good content here, but we only(easily) have access to the content posted in the last week. That is a HUGE disadvantage. Imagine using Youtube and you could only ever find content posted in the last 7 days, it would be useless.

In parallel, we need better and transparent analytics so that we can properly reward users that are bringing in traffic, or completing tasks that we find valuable. If you think about it, if someone was bringing in a lot of outside eyeballs, how would anyone even know? IMO, we should create a simple easy to quickly read and understand iconography that shows up on posts that at a glance give a snapshot of the amount of traffic a page is getting. ex a bar that goes from red to green with colors in between representing a certain number of page views. This way, curators can start to "enforce" that large curation won't happen unless you meet x benchmark etc.

Lastly, we need more comprehensive and sophisticated search features, again so that we can use ALL the content on the chain, not just what was posted in the last 7 days.

On Stakeholders

Stop rewarding shit, and ditch some cultural ideas that people have gotten used to around here.

-"We should spread the votes around" I think this is the wrong approach. I think we need better tools to be able to recognize and define what we find valuable, then ONLY reward that. At the individual level everyone has their own stake and no one can control what anyone else votes on and that's great, I think it's most important just that the largest stakeholders are more strict with their stake. All the small stakeholders can support each other so everyone can get SOMETHING, but the correlation to valuable content getting the most rewards can and should be dramatically increased. This in combination with stronger features around people using liquid Hive, I think can dramatically improve our situation.

-"Everyone should have a turn getting a big reward" This one is less prevalent, but I have seen it.

-"Its a bad thing that the same people get all the rewards" Once we have a better system for defining who is adding value, it will almost certainly be a small number of people. Especially in the beginning, but if the user can SEE what the metrics are, so the know what they need to improve, THEN when they improve those things, they can see tangible results, you will see the behavior you want repeated.

In our current state, since there is no correlation or definition of what is valuable and what will be rewarded. That incentivises low value posts, because to the end user, what this system says to them is that whether you put in a lot of time or a little time, you may or may not get high rewards, so in light of that humans are going to human and take the path of least resistance.

In regards to autovotes, I don't think this is bad per se, it's sort of our own Patreon model, where people support the person vs any individual piece of content. I actually think this is a strong feature and should be supported and enhanced BUT, better metrics need to be thrown into the mix so that that can be a consideration when people decide who to autovote.

On End users

I really feel like most of the people here are doing what the system incentivises them to do. Imagine there is user x. They have a decent following on some other platform. They work their ass off to move that following here which for content creators, their community is their greatest asset, in some cases literally their livelihood.

Do we have systems in place to reward that behavior? How long would we? How would we track it? How much would we give them? Can we empower them to succeed more than they would on whatever platform they're on? Basically what would they get for doing that? It's a huge risk, a huge ask, and we don't have anything concrete to offer them.

That was basically a whole post in a comment, but it will be a good rough draft for my post, but to summarize, IMO, it's not up to the end user and it's not their fault, all of us highly engaged users and builders, it's on us to improve the system and I think we're at the point where the most important changes are not at the blockchain level, it's at the frontend level.

Rant over :)