It's a solid proposal and worth a big vote. I don't necessarily agree with all parts of it, but I like your contribution to the discussion.
First, I think passive investors should be paid a return to keep them from mucking with the content through either posting or voting. If the rewards must go through the system, then higher curation rewards certainly would be preferable to expecting people to post junk for reward votes. But it still perverts things somewhat. I'd support it if there's no realistic option to simply pay passive investors some return, but I'd much rather pay them to stay on the sidelines and not feel like they need to post or vote on junk.
As for the downvotes, I think it could be abused unless the rep score accounts for voting behavior somehow. I'm not against your suggestion, but I'd have to think about it more, and I suspect it would need another component to be successful.
As for superlinear rewards, I just don't see it. I still think that would be a mistake because we've been there and seen that things work better with linear. Superlinear is a faster route to more concentration of wealth and power, which is the wrong direction. I think believing that superlinear would work also assumes that larger SP holders would vote for the best content, which is not necessarily the case, though I do appreciate that you are trying to find the right economic balance with curation rewards also. I'm probably one of the people who would benefit from superlinear, but I don't know that it's in the platform's best interest.
Would it be possible to fork some testnet where various ideas like these could be tested?
I've found a place for passive investors that doesn't involve messing with the natural flow of content production or consumption. I explain in detail within this post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@nonameslefttouse/turning-rage-into-the-soothing-steem-now-blowing-out-my-butt-as-i-mince-my-words-for-you-the-reader-of-this
the common struggle someone like me faces as a content producer here after all these years and I offer a solution that could easily fit in with what @kevinwong talks about here. The post leads to other posts with more information. The comment sections are jammed with even more. People are scratching their heads wondering how to bring new money into the platform and I'm clearly stating the fact this is the entertainment industry and a functional promotional system using ads is one way to bring this new money in. I've explained how, but I need more people to see it.
Yes Utopian is working to setup a definitive place to study the proposal and read opinions about it. @reggaemuffin seems to be handling a testnet so it’s likely we can test these things.
The same problem is going to persist unfortunately, as we’re only effectively shrinking the rewards pool for the passive staking allocation, while the economic incentives for the rest of the users remain the same.
Previously we were at superlinear (n^2). Today we are at linear (n). The proposal suggests somewhere in between (n^1.3) which should be more balanced while making it less predictable for people to put a price on votes, providing variance/contrast, and abuses would only be possible by piling up votes for a more substantial payout so its more manageable for the community.
Cheaper downvotes is more for contingency as most wouldn’t practice it anyway. It just makes it easier to take down abuses or overvalued posts from any gaming. All said, there’s some social cost to cheaper downvotes, but I think the benefits outweigh the downsides of this proposal.
I would prefer a curve which started as n^2 / exponential (thus flat), and then later changed into linear which would work against self-voting as well as excessive rewards.
@clayop had a similar idea.