Mostly agree with what you're saying.

I was one of the ones who squeezed the EIP through the door for this HF, and contributed to arriving to those numbers as a package.

Right now content indifferent voting (self voting, vote selling, vote swapping etc.) pay roughly 4x more than honest voting (curation). This has resulted in, by some estimates, 75%+ of active stake participating in those above schemes at the expense of the ecosystem. That means if you spend your voting power on fighting abuse, not only is it expensive, 75%+ of it will just go to other abusers. This common knowledge of the futility and expensiveness of fighting abuse prevents the entire system from self correcting.

The EIP should be viewed as a package. Upping curation to 50% closes the 4x gap to 2x right away. And the 25% serves as a further deterrent to undermine dishonest voting. Under the EIP it will only take 2 similarly sized stakeholders to use their downvotes on a self voter like me to push my rewards down to 50% (without it costing them a cent), at which point I could make just as much curating honestly so I might as well as it benefits the entire platform. This in turn frees up their downvotes to fight abuse elsewhere and I'll likely join them. This goes for bid botted posts, circle jerking and other abuses too.

The curve just forces all profitable voting behavior into the light. Without the curve people may attempt to hide all their self votes in 0.02 micro votes all over the place in thousands of accounts, dodging downvotes. The curve just makes it so that if you're doing that, again you may as well just curate as you're losing 50% anyway.

Overall, we're hoping to get 2 good actors for every bad actor under the new economic system for it to broadly work. I can't promise it'll work but it's a fairly sound first attempt.

You were one of the earliest ones to see the importance of having correct economics here and the problems with the current one. I don't know why the fuck they kicked you out of slack, but it sure made it harder for people like kevin and I to get people to pay attention to this issue, and it took us over a year (we gave up a few times along the way, especially me).

Honest voting is such a fundamental part of a content discovery and rewards platform which we espouse to be. Like you, I really don't know why we've been stuck with a broken system for years. I even consider the earlier attempts of n^2 and hyperinflation to be almost as bad, although not quite due to a large part because abuse wasn't as sophisticated at the time.

I don't know why it's such a low priority. With a broken economic system, almost every individual, bot and 'business' are forced to behave in a harmful way to the entire system to profit. Indeed how many people or businesses who've profited over the last couple of years could honestly say they did so in a way that added value for the entire steem ecosystem? Maybe not none, but not many. Most just extract rewards, use votes as payment in lieu of transfer, or used Steem as a springboard to fuck off to greener pastures. Not entirely because we're all greedy or malicious, but we can only respond to economic incentives and the ones here are just mental broken.

Fixing the economics will enable everything else. Otherwise, all the other shit is for naught. SMTs, Marketing etc. are just the wrong thing to prioritize when our fundamental economic system causes the platform to hemorrhage value. We shouldn't have thrown that much dev work on a shitcoin generator that never came to being (or the mobile app fail, or whatever the ass Destiny was meant to be) before the economy functioned. We're alexa rank 5000, and were 800 at one point. We have hundreds of thousands of people on a mailing list. The best marketing would be to have a fucking functioning system which is precisely what the EIP is designed to do.

I wish this was as obvious to everyone else at it is to some of us, yourself included of course. Maybe people are starting to see it now but jesus fucks it came pretty late. I think Inc is better after the restructure now, because before, every time I brought this up I was told to go fuck myself. It's really quite exhausting.

Anyway, I'm not super passionate about the SPS and wish the funding started off a little lower and didn't come from rewards pool, but it is what it is, and I'm not against it in concept. Also woulda preferred the reverse auction timer to be around 2-5mins. No biggie.

Let's hope the EIP gets us most of the way to honest voting at acceptable negative side effects, eg tolerable level of toxicity and corporate sabotage due to free downvotes, tolerable level of inequality due to curve etc. I'm optimistic with the numbers there but we'll see when it kicks in. If it came tomorrow it'll only be 3 years late.

Anyway, catch ya.