You completely assessed and reasoned out everything in your writing wrongly, in my opinion.  It's the tragedy of the commons and abuse is being widely distributed and the easiest path is to sell or trade votes, so good luck getting people to flag, especially having it as a sustained activity.

My activity on Steem has fallen off the cliff ever since I realised the problem. But still, my "doing of nothing" is only voting for myself at 1%-2%, which grew to about 5%-10% recently. Account curation is certainly way better than just pumping out posts and self-votes all the time for the sake of it. I could just call it a day and make life much easier by just selling off the votes. But those would just be going to more abuse.

> That isn't how most investment works. Passive investments are usually either Interest or growth of the company. Not getting paid every day to watch your stake grow. ;)

Yeah tell that to the vote traders and all. How about risk-free vote trading ventures? I've been holding out for the past year and just about to go reclaiming 100% of my votes, but I'm not doing it. If I do it with the rest then I'm using my allocated slice of the inflation 100% on myself and many would go this route as time goes on. Which is why I'm proposing 50% because I think that's the best the network will be able to achieve. Can't expect 100% of inflation going entirely to "good use". Now it's less than 25%.

>Actually, yes it was worse when the Selected few were the ONLY thing that could get to trending. There wasn't a single thing anyone could do to gain attention. (and the other parts of your comment)

You just seem beyond comprehending the current predicament and that the previous situation was based on quadratic rewards, without any of the elements in the proposal I've put forth like extra downvotes, rewards curve between linear and quadratic, and 50% curation rewards. There'll be side effects of course, but the point is not to leave those that curate and engage in the dust.

Sure I agree we need more stakeholders who are active and curate, but more specifically those that can also fund those who do. Still, this activity is currently much less profitable than just trading it or using it all on oneself, so I'm not sure if we should trick more folks into actively curating under the circumstance, hence the proposal to put things in the middle-ground. The point again is not to leave those that curate and engage in the dust. Steem's current economy is fundamentally not making this possible and is giving people $1000 everytime they take a shit in public.

I got nothing against whatever people are doing. The incentives are just not aligned between profit maximisation and the good of the platform atm.