There are a lot of ideas going around whose intent is to supposedly improve the Steem and Steemit situation (low price, members leaving, less content etc). These include changing the reward formula from linear to exponential, making flagging easier, and of course changing reward payouts from 75/25 to 50/50.
I have been here for over two years and if I don't remember mistakenly we had exponential rewards a while back but it was changed because the big guys were cornering most of the rewards. So now we want to go back to that? And then we have the idea that flagging is going to fix things. How? I have no idea, the main example is @haejin who has been flagged endlessly (deservedly or not) but he still remains if not the top certainly one of the top earners around here. So flagging did no good there.
But since both these things have already been done I guess people should be able to figure out what is good and what isn't and since what I have written is my opinion I agree that I could be wrong and both of the above options will be OK for the platform.
But the 50/50 reward payout is something I hadn't seen before so I have thought about this since last night and I have come up with these conclusions:
a) 50/50 is good if you have a high vote value, for example if each vote was giving you a curation reward of $1.00 you would now be getting $2.00, 10 times a day that is $10.00 extra a day. I would think many of the whales can get much more than that from curation. I don't know what the daily reward pool is, but say it is $80,000.00, this means with 75/25, $20,000.00 were curation rewards, if they change this to 50/50 curation rewards will be $40,000.00, so the big voters will be the big winners there, you just have to see what percentage of curation reward a guy gets and then double the dollar amount.
b) Authors will get less, this is a given, instead of $60,000.00 from the rewards pool they will only get $40,000.00 period. Rewards will not get any higher so 40K is tops, you can say well go out and vote more, if my vote is worth only a penny or two I really won't be getting much by curating, and I will certainly lose out on author rewards, so its lose-lose for small guys.
c) If one of the problems that Steemit is facing is people leaving, and less people signing up and less activity, I don't really see how you can improve these by reducing rewards for authors.
d) The other point is that bid bots will suffer because who is going to use bid bots if they are only going to get 50% of the vote the bid bot gives. Well I would figure it would be the same people who are now using bid bots and are only getting 75% of that bid bot vote. You see bid bots are used for these reasons, as an advertisement for your article so more eyes will see it, as a way to increase REP and as a way to make more money.
What I do when I use a bid bot to earn more money is that I bet this bidbot vote will return my money and make me a profit, with 50/50 the odds of you making money are significantly reduced, but even now most people are not making a profit with bid bots, so I think it is a little in the gambler all of us has that makes bid bots such a success (for the owners and delegators of course). I have only used these bots a few times, first to test them, and then I needed to increase my REP to reach another level. So I am not a bid bot customer and I actually would like to see them go.
Yes, my points might not be 100% accurate and maybe someone could show me where I am wrong, but if I am right the move to 50/50 would just benefit a group of people and in fact Steemit as a platform would probably suffer.