In a discussion I had with @trafalgar , in the comment section of this post on the subject of Improving the Economics of Steem, an interesting question turned out to be the core of our disagreement. The proposal @trafalgar assumes insentives can be devices to make passive stake holders (those with a lot of SP who can't currently be bothered to do any manual curation) become active curators. In my counter proposal, I assume passive stake holders will remain passive stakeholders regardless of economic incentives.

If we for the sake of argument assume that a lot of passive stake holders would at best rather pay someone to write them a script to fit the incentive than actually spent any time curating, my question is, what passive stakeholder behaviour would be most beneficial to the platform

Given that any attempt to improve the ecomomic system of the platform, I feel it is of high importance to think about what behaviour we should want this (stakewise) large group of stakeholders to gravitate towards. That is, it is hard enough to find the right measures to incentify behaviour you know you want and discourage behaviour you know you don't want. It is absolutely impossible to do so if you haven't explored the different options passive stake holders have, and have considered which of the available passive income options are most beneficial (or least disruptive) to the platform.

Algoritmic curation

While there is no substitute for real curation, algoritmic curation is likely the closest we are going to get stake holders set on settle on. It can be argued that algoritmic curation at least moves funds from the stake oriented sub economy to the content economy, but it also can be argued that algoritmic curation disrupts the content economy with false curation votes.

Running (or delegating to) bid bots

Currently bid-bots are a win/win for both bid bot owners and users. While the ROI on bid bots is approximately 100%, this basically translates to bid bot users getting free advertising (trending) and a free boost to their reputation, while in return the bid bot owner basically gets the same income he would get if he was to spent all his voting strength on self-votes. It can be argued that bid bots provide a valuable service that allow smal accounts to get the spotlight they deserve. It can also be argued that bid bots ruin the trending pages and poison the reputation system.

Actual self-votes on automated posts

A stake holder can just automate making up to ten posts a day and self-up-vote them. It can be argued that this behaviour poisons the content eco system less than the above two options. It can also be argued that as no money actually flows to real content providers and the trending is still affected, that this behaviour actually hurts the platform more.

Actual self-votes on automated comments on their own posts

There is a second way to self-up-vote. As self-up-votes on posts mess with the trending pages and up votes on comments don't, it can be argued that self-up-voting your own comments on your own posts is less disruptive than self-up-voting your own posts themselves.

Powering down and selling stake

One last option we must consider passive stake holders may get incentified for would be powering down and selling their stake. It can be argued that this is good as it reduces the inflation needed to fund the content economy, but then it can also be argued that doing so would drive down the price of STEEM considerably and could even end up destroying the platform by making running a witness node uneconomical.

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Which of the above options do you feel would be most beneficial to the platform passive stakeholders to choose.

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Algoritmic curation (31.58%) 6 / 19 Powering down and selling their stake (26.32%) 5 / 19 Other (comment) (21.05%) 4 / 19 Actual self-votes on comments on their own posts (15.79%) 3 / 19 Actual self-votes on automated posts (5.26%) 1 / 19