I had a little idea. Witness's get extra vests right? Can they be redistributed?
You can guess where I am going with this. You want people to vote for witness's..make it profitable for them. Give cash back or something similar for voting for a witness. 10% of the vests maybe.
EDIT: vests earned from your vote. Not the entire pool.
Some due this, but it's essentially vote buying, and I'm not personally a fan of it. That's how you get oligarchies.
Voting for witnesses, IMO, should be motivated by your desire to have a secure, efficient Steemit system for the long term, not just for short term rewards.
But who knows, maybe this will change and people will pool their resources together much like a mining pool in proof of work systems and then share the rewards among the group. The witness still has to run the server and continue with other efforts to earn their position though.
It is vote buying. But if it was a simple kickback everyone recieved then that in itself would raise massive awareness. Probably lead to sheep mentality though. People will just pick whoever is popular regardless of the actual use.
It's a tough one because the witness system is hard for people to care about. The majority of the smaller accounts are not investors and will never think like one. This will only get worse as time goes on.
Maybe instead of considering it buying votes. Consider it raising awareness through monetary gain.
The smaller accounts don't really impact the witness selection at all. If they have few VESTs, they have little influence on who is an active witness. I do think it's important to educate them for if/when their account does grow in value, but to me the risks of a wealthy whale who may not be a good actor for the network buying up votes is not worth the benefit of more people voting.
Oh although it is obvious now that you say it, I should have realized that myself. I guess I don't have any better solution than yours then. Education and awareness it is!