Another well written post @kevinwong . I have resteemed it. It is a very thought provoking situation and the feeling that our support is eroding away in favor of bid bot delegation and heavy self voting is very real.

There is no easy solution to this issue. Before you got here @trafalgar we had just as many problems if not worse problems. We had a hand full of god kings ruling us that got here 3 weeks before myself and a lot of other content creators did. There were a lot of catfish / sock puppet accounts soaking up a good chunk of the reward pool.

Personally as frustrating as certain things have been I would take this version of STEEM over the 2016 version all day every day.

If we went back to the old reward curve and my vote went to $0.02 this place would absolutely come unglued. All the content creators who weren't already STEEM rich would be back to being a court jester trying to impress a handful of kings.

The price would totally collapse again because people would see that they could power up even $10,000 and their vote would still be worth basically nothing so they would realize that it is pointless and leave.

I don't have an absolute solution but I think the delegation initiatives to the 3rd party apps like DLive, DTube, Busy are great and maybe some substantial power should be granted to more community building leaders who have been selflessly upvoting others for months / years to keep creators engaged.

Also another remedy to certain situations is having top 40 witnesses agree to address issues like @haejin in accordance to what the community wants. Possibly creating a web app that we can steem connect to and everyone who has a reputation over a certain number can vote on solutions. Each account with over 1000 SP and a Rep of 55 could vote on what to do and the Witnesses would carry out the communities wishes or something of that nature.

Otherwise we end up like the Matrix with no Neo to take care of some of these issues once and for all.