I appreciate the substantive reply.

"The only way to abuse the system will be to create a myriad of sockpuppets."

I am aware of several folks that have thousands of socks, perhaps in the tens of thousands. Competent coders can roll their own VPN's. Beyond that, and even simpler, dynamic IPs make IP utterly unsuitable as a means of ID. TOR exists, and demonstrates that seeking to use IP as a means of enabling 1a1v just ignores actual TCPIP tech. Prove you can change your IP trivially by turning your cable router off, and back on. Voila! a new IP, easy even for a non-techy. Folks with skillz can have as many IPs as they can have socks, which is limited only by the time and treasure they throw at the goal.

" This benefit is not a benefit if they cannot upvote their posts as the former GUI had a tick box for."

This is demonstrably false. Financial benefit is not the only benefit extant. I cannot count the examples that show other benefits people seek than financial. I'll provide one, but know that I only provide one because encyclopedic walls of text would result from trying to provide even a small percentage of them.

@fulltimegeek delegated moderate stake to various users he thought would benefit the community on Steem through having more VP. He didn't seek any direct financial return from doing so. I myself have a similar delegation of stake, though not from @fulltimegeek. The community provides many valuable goods and services that are not money, and are actually far more valuable than money. Reducing the reasons to own Steem to mere ROI so devalues Steem that we have observed it drop in value by almost two orders of magnitude from it's high as Stinc seeks to serve the interests of ninjaminers who grasp only financial value, and thus disregard how doing so destroys their stake - because digits have no value, and society is the source of value.

"How about I just feed the homeless instead? There's far less work involved, and I can get that feel-good feeling just by looking at the smile it produces on their faces."

You do not grasp the value of society. Feeding the homeless just encourages homelessness. Wanna actually help them get off the streets? You'd do better to encourage them to undertake the effort necessary by discouraging them from remaining on the street. Public flogging comes to mind.

The point of curation is clearly as varied as those curating. You may want to feel warm and fuzzy when you encourage someone to do what they're doing. I may want to feel bold and daring by upvoting trolls. Folks interested in ROI will do better to upvote devs and community builders than themselves, because self votes destroy the value of Steem. We have seen that self voting ninjaminers have more tokens, but less value as a result of their incomprehension of investing. It's why we are here and observing extant conditions on Steem.

I have pointed out over and over and over that the market is what gives money value. When the market grows, which can be encouraged by voting, then the tokens are more widely sought, which raises the price. Hoarding does the opposite. Self voting plays keep away with tokens, and whales extract ~90% of rewards using stake to manipulate the rewards mechanism(s).

That's why investors have no interest in self voting: it will not increase the value of their tokens. We can see they are correct because of the actual observable price of Steem and the user retention that has gotten worse every time increasing ability to use stake weighting to extract rewards has been hard forked in.

Warren Buffet wants to make a lot of money. He became the richest man in the world investing. He bought companies and improved them, growing the markets for them, and increasing the value of their tokens (stocks). It's not rocket science, but it seems some people simply cannot beat their heads through the brick wall that keeps them from understanding that encouraging folks to use Steem will grow the market for Steem and increase the value of tokens as the market grows - and nothing else will.

Society is infinitely more valuable than it's financial assets. Take away one of the two and society will retain it's value without reservation. Financial assets will not. They are only imbued with value by society, and the reverse will never be true. To imbue financial assets with value, increase their utility to society. Steem has continually and increasingly done the opposite by increasingly enabling stake to manipulate rewards and extract tokens thereby.

"Forced altruism is the stuff of dictatorships."

Forced profiteering is too. Disabling the forcing of profiteering is not forcing altruism. It's simply allowing that actual ability to compete in the market. Warren Buffet could have made a lot of money by parting out some of the companies he has purchased, because the price he paid for them was almost always less than the market value of their assets. He has never done so and has made a lot more money than he could have from parting them out.

The code presently prevents altruism by forcing profiteering, and the last post I saw from @felipejoys is a simple acknowledgement of this. Extracting author rewards via stake weighting is tantamount to selling the forges and presses of a factory. It's far less financially rewarding than using that tooling better to attract a larger market, and Steem today is all the proof you need of that.

"If you fix the profiteering issue too well, then you've got another North Korea on your hands."

No. We're in N. Korea now. Forced profiteering is no less tyrannical than forced donations... er, taxes. Profiteers aren't investors. They're destroyers of investments. Bain Capital Partners serially destroys companies by exactly that method. The code isn't random or impartial. It isn't socially agnostic. It deliberately devalues every other metric for value and completely focuses users to use stake weighting to extract rewards by practically eliminating the rewards content creators can attain. That's what HF21 did: cut author rewards in half, added a 10% tax for SPS to the 10% tax we already had to provide witnesses, and doubled the ability of stake to extract rewards via curation.

I am reminded of the old witticism 'the beatings will continue until morale improves.' It's bass ackwards. Rewarding people you want to keep doing the things they're doing will encourage them to keep doing it, like feeding homeless people on the street. BTW, I've been homeless, so I'm not ignorant of what makes people homeless, nor what it takes to not be homeless anymore. I've also been an accredited investor, so neither am ignorant of how to make money investing. I speak of these things from that base of experience.

"There can be a game tab on the top, and it can replace the stupid promotion tab."

Actually your best idea.

"Carrots and carrots only."

No, that's not how life works. Those homeless people? No sticks, which is exactly what I mentioned to discourage them from sleeping on the street. Dysentery is a stick, in that sense, which discourages degeneracy, or bad public infrastructure. Sticks are an inevitable part of life, and it is carrots that are optional.

Anyway, until you grasp that money only has value because people give it that value, investing will never make sense, and you will continue to understand only profiteering - which is actually the opposite of investing. Investing builds value and profiteering destroys it. That's why Steem has declined in value by orders of magnitude, and this decline is obviously the result of forcing users to leave by extracting the rewards they should be getting to encourage them to produce content. Profiteering does this to every company it touches. Berkshire Hathaway is an example of investing, and BCP is an example of profiteering. Berkshire Hathaway companies become more valuable (not just in terms of stock price, but in every measurable social metric) and BCP companies are destroyed completely.

Only because the ninjaminers can't sell the content creators themselves does Steem still exist.