RE: Steem 0.17 Change Proposal Introduction
Most bots are voting for money, they have incentives to not vote for contents that will be mass-flagged.
I will agree with you there. The risk of wasting voting power wouldn't be worth it when seeking ROI, particularly from curation, which is already not that high for most users.
...it's easier for the "good people" to react.
The question is - what can be done when the abusers are actually the larger stakeholders, as was the case a few months back? The other large stakeholders mostly took no action. So, if there is no reaction and other stakeholders don't have enough power to make a difference, the abuse goes on unabated. I don't know what the solution would be, but having the post reward limits/penalties would at least be able to curb that.
What other back-end options do you think there could be that could address abuse vs. unwillingness/ineffectiveness to mitigate it on the front-end?
I would say the same stake-holders are still "pod voting" The accounts change, but the behavior doesn't. No changes to the system will stop a few accounts that vote for a handful of accounts each day.
Maybe the builders of the bots can build a feature where they can vote on some of their fav. accounts on odd days, and different accounts on even days.
Downvote, and it is still effective in shifting the incentives even if you aren't a larger stakeholder.
Consider a whale who has a choice of where to deploy one of his or her valuable and scarce 40 (full) votes per day. Choice A will get downvoted and Choice B will not. The incentives then favor B.
Unfortunately this isn't an instant gratification solution, but because it takes time for incentives like this to work, but they do work.