What I'm trying to solve is not really to make it easier or harder to play. It's that it is always more worth to not play the game and let a bot do it than to play it. Because a lot of stuff is a no brainer. For instance I have probably 55+$ worth of autovotes on all of my posts because people know that my posts tends to do well, so they automatically vote on them at the 4 minute mark (it's the optimal time to vote before the other auto voters and where the reward time curve is not punishing too hard). Within 5 minutes, the curve part where the blockchain rewards early voter is completely maxed out. So unless you constantly refresh my posts, you will probably lose out to automation.

This is a game, if you don't have time to play the game effectively, so sad.

I like the game analogy, the problem to me is that the game is not fun to play. This could be effectively solved with layer two solutions with a proper recommendation system. Imo the change I am recommending is kinda applying band-aid to a cut limb. There is a much bigger problem with the way content is distributed, content sorting by rewards is a mistake and should never have happened. If you look at reddit or medium, most of the content at the top (their version of trending) isn't that interesting because it's not relevant to you. All of the interesting stuff is on your feed, but the feed on hive is just a list of stuff that was published, and you need to create that feed yourself, there is no gamification, no addictive design, no recommendations (think medium or youtube) to keep you reading more stuff.

As central as you are to the creation of the coin, howo, you should be looking for ways to make extraction harder, not easier, imo.

That's another point that is a bit controversial, but I don't think having a coin that inflates that much is healthy, ideally I would like to have the reward model be based on something like the proposal system, where stakeholders can define how much money goes into curation rewards, into author rewards, into the dao itself etc.

Another thing that I thought of is simply not allowing to power down author rewards (it's not something I actively want but something I am thinking of). You earn more stake in the network which earns you curation rewards and more control over the network, I don't know right now, but about a year ago someone ran a study on the chain data, and found out that almost all of the author rewards were sold, either instantly, or powered down and sold over time, Why do we allow ourselves to have such downpressure for so little gain ? The downside with such system is that then bad actors would have stake and will be there on the platform wrecking havock forever.
Imo rewards should be defined by how much something is bringing to the ecosystem itself. If I had more time I would experiment with a front end / community thing with ads where the money is used to buy hive and then distributed to the authors depending on how many pageviews they have, that way at worst they sell and you have equal buy/sell pressure at best they power it up and keep it which just means more buy pressure.

This would solve another thing, due to the fact that a hive post only needs to get the attention of hive stakeholders, there is 0 incentive to share your post outside of it, which means that we don't get any of the "free marketing" that we would otherwise get from people sharing the content. For instance i've seen tons of tik tok videos even though I have never been on the app, just because people share them around.

Tl;dr: The game rules are not correctly set which creates a vicious circle.

*Hive dropped out of the top 100 coins.

Yeah I know, but give us more time, we haven't even released our first fork, it takes a lot of effort to erase all of the things that have been done wrong in the last 4 years. And we can't just solve them all in 3 months.

Very Ned of y'uns, iyam.

Haha I like how you use ned as an insult

Sorry if this is all over the place, I kinda dumped a lot of my thoughts into one comment.