I think actions would need to be taken to disincentive delegating SP to bots.
Right now people with high SPs no longer have to curate content. They don't have to participate or contribute to the community anything other than their voting power. They simply delegate to bots for the payouts, and then content creators pay for the privilege to self-curate. Once a content creator has built up, or bought, enough SP, they can then join the virtuous cycle.
Its a complete breakdown to how things are 'supposed' to work.
I'm in agreement. We need to give high SP a reason to curate again. It needs to be better than what the bidbots or delegating can do. It needs to show an equal or better profit, or at least close enough to it, and if there is altruism involved in any of this, it needs to be something that will increase visibility and be best for the long term viability of this ecosystem. There may be other criteria, too, to make this work.
So, how do we get from where we are to there? What can we do, as a community, to incentivize all of that? Or can we?
Asking, pleading, begging or even shaming them to back off the bots and delegation and come back to curating hasn't worked. Those who are already inclined to commit to the community in some fashion, at their own loss, I might add, already are. So, there needs to be more of something involved, which I believe at least partially means some acceptable level of potential profit.
I wish I knew the answer. I'm open to suggestions. HFs always seem to have consequences, intended or not, and those seem to always lead to some other workaround.
Looking at it from another angle—If enough people stopped using bidbots, they would go away. So, then, how do we incentivize the bot users to stand down?
As you can see, I'm all questions and no answers. :)
Some ideas:
Just some thoughts... I may have to put these into a new Steemit-oriented post. :)
Okay, so first off, you've obviously given this a lot of thought. :) Second of all, you absolutely do need to turn this all into a formal post.
In looking at the links, it's also obvious you've been working on solutions for a long time. It must be totally frustrating to still be addressing things that you were bringing up at least nine months ago.
All of these ideas you suggest are great, as far as I'm concerned. They do all appear to be code related items, which means someone on the dev and exec side of things needs to be on board with it.
So, how does that happen, when so much other stuff is on their radar? Communities is supposed to help with the visibility issue (we'll see) but most of the rest of this isn't really on the radar. How does it get on the radar?
I keep hearing that the community has a say, but the community is too often fractured, throwing their full weight behind things that are the results of the real issues. What's it going to take for enough of us to get around even some of the ideas you list so that we're enough to affect change? How many of us do we need?
If you do end up making this a post, I'll be very interested to see what the response is. If it's anything like the discussion about bidbots currently going on, it will be hot, it will be heavy, but at least the dialogue will be started.