Hmm, I never liked the crab story, same goes for downvotes.

I've never been a fan of downvotes, either. But it's the only regulatory mechanism that's designed into the blockchain. Over the years, I have reluctantly concluded that they are necessary under the current rewards algorithms.

When we're seeing almost 40% of SP delegated to teams that have near-0 ownership stake in the chain, that's not a healthy dynamic either. Since those delegators are motivated to post daily, I suspect that the percentage of daily posts/rewards is substantially higher than 40%. IMO, the blockchain would be better served using those rewards to recruit legitimate authors. To me, at this point downvoting the worst of the worst is the lesser of two evils - at least in the short term.

In this context, we had previously talked about an investor account, which seems to be difficult to implement. Perhaps an investor community would be a way forward; posts in this special community could be hidden at front-end level, at least in trending.

Right, something like the investor account could actually be implemented just by turning on SBD interest at a high enough level, but there's probably not much appetite for that unless the price stays stable above the haircut threshold. If we can't eliminate the 0-effort posting, I'd also support hiding it, but that doesn't solve the underlying problem of misdirected social-media rewards.

Longer term, I have always thought we could find a rewards algorithm that would mitigate the need for downvotes, and I still think that's the ideal solution.