RE: What if paid voting services provided truly passive ROI for their clients? Would this be an improvement for the ecosystem?
I would definitely have a bias of quality over recency - even if it means that nothing recent gets shared - for exactly the reason that you mention (putting more effort in due to the longer-term reward opportunity). That might even prompt somebody like me to prioritise the content that you share with this exact objective in mind.
especially if I also filter accounts that have been active on Hive
Good point and probably an important one. I won't want to be voting on something, knowing that the STEEM will just get sold to buy HIVE.
a problem is that Steemit wallet doesn't show beneficiary rewards
I think that's a feature that you should suggest to symbionts with their Wallet upgrade proposal. I know that the wallet is limited by the number of transactions that it shows but I see little reason why the beneficiary transactions shouldn't be included in the feed (i.e. show the author and post that the beneficiary came from).
Of course that would be easy enough to dodge, just by using different account names, but at least it will filter out the historical posts from people who are/were actively hostile to Steem. I'm excluding hive participants during testing, and I'll play it by ear after that. Maybe it's just as simple as labeling the author's information with their hive inactivity time and let the voters decide how to reward it.
I suppose I could include posts from inactive accounts and hive participants in the output but send beneficiary rewards to null, but that starts to feel kludgy. Also, there are some hive participants who are decent contributors here, too. Handling that situation in the long term will be challenging. "A few bad apples spoil the bunch", as they say...
Good idea. I will do that.
Ah... found this issue from 2018: Increase Reward Beneficiaries Soft Cap #2162:
And further down:
No idea why they implemented a soft cap, but that seems to be the challenge...