Over the last few weeks I've been thinking about ways we could increase the demand for Steem Power, the quality of curated content and the incentives to participate as a Steem curator.
Here are a couple ideas I have been kicking around. They're not fully mature and could use a good rinsing by the community.
Allow Steem holders to delegate their Steem Power voting rights to a voting pool
A delegated voting pool could socialize voting power and individualize rewards. One prime use for this could be the @steemit account. @steemit could create a voting pool and invite anyone with a verified identity and good reputation to join the pool as a curator. This could increase the number of unique curators, help bootstrap Steem as an identity database and give people even more incentives to sign up.
To show the numbers, an example would be Alice Bob and Charley each delegate their SP of 2, 3, and 7 to one voting pool. Now they each have 4, 4, and 4 SP to be used to curate. Better curation would earn them more curation rewards.
A side effect of delegated voting pools could be voting markets. Any user would have the power to create a voting pool and these users could charge curators for participation. Some of the platform's whales could be interested in offering subscription models to minnows as a way to get more voting influence.
If powering down stake loses voting influence
Imagine that any stake being powered down would lose its rights to use voting influence. This could make the system very clear in the regard that stake is either in or it is out. Users could be able to choose any % of their stake to power down regardless of how many accounts they have and only the % stake that is powering down would lose voting influence. Stopping a power down could return all voting rights.
Perhaps the effect of this could be 1/ more interest to stay in the platform and 2/ more fluidity in the witness queue 3/ more fairness regarding the PoS nature of Steem 4/ more clarity from participants looking to exit the system
Combined effect?
Perhaps these proposals could have a combined effect that increases the demand and fluidity of Steem Power while improving the curated experience for people visiting Steem based websites.