Only altruistic behaviour -- at a real, tangible value cost -- can change the direction of the system or undo any entrenchment.
Facebook's "altruistic behavior" of offering a free service at substantial tangible cost has made them into a half-a-trillion dollar company. In the end, it wasn't really altruistic.
In theory on Steem, inflation is being traded by stakeholders for content which attracts user attention. And the market has already proved that user attention is immensely valuable. In the long term, a vote-trading scheme in a valueless race to the bottom is far less lucrative than honest voting in a system that attracts user attention.
The problem that remains, though, is replacing short-term race to the bottom voters with long-term value voters. At some point, weak hands are replaced by strong ones, and the price gets low enough to force the shift, but it could be painful to get to that point.
I think you and @lukestokes would agree, there's no such thing as 'altruism', as the end goal is changing the system in a way you desire.
Good insights. The hope is that we can educate to avoid the price going low due to short term interests. :)
Agreed. The trick lies in persuading a sufficient portion of voters that voting to attract or retain eyeballs can be far more valuable than a nominal increase in daily rewards of declining value.
And yes, I try to avoid absolutes when talking about human nature, and I don't recall seeing that post before, but I have long held the opinion that altruism is either incredibly rare or non-existent.
Another thought is that the existence of layer 2 tokens like steem-engine tokens & SMTs changes the analysis, too.
If a single post can be flagged or ignored under one curation regime, but highly rewarded under another, the value differences among curation strategies become visible much more easily.
As my analysis is designed towards candidate (e.g. witness) voting, the same arguments can't be directly ported over to rewards pool voting. Existence of a second layer token wouldn't necessarily detract anything from my analysis, I don't think, since the different economic systems can be identified in a closed-body way from each other.
Analyzing rewards pool voting is a whole other can of worms too..