There is a lot of buzz about some comments @ned made while on his Korean tour about changing to more of an account based voting system rather than a STEEM Power (SP) based voting system.
See @happymoneyman/steemit-is-changing-how-it-affects-you as an example.
The Problem
The problem that this is in reaction to is the fact that the only way to get on hot or trending, where most of the users spend their time browsing, is to either buy votes from various bots or have a whale backing you like haejin does.
As someone who has had posts buried by haejin, I understand the frustration.
This is all contrary to the "proof of brain" vision that STEEM originally had. The idea was that quality content would be upvoted by the community. But what we have seen evolve is that those with the cash can pretty much manipulate the votes and the rewards pool at will.
The Answer?
Will account based voting, where each account's upvote is worth the same (at least as far as visibility purposes), solve this issue?
On the first pass, you might think so. If you get a lot of votes, your content will move up in the listings. So far, so good.
But look at the logical next steps, what will the response be to this kind of change?
Instead of looking for just powerful upvotes from bots and whales, which it seems will still be worth more rewards, content creators will look for mass votes.
So that means tons of accounts. It's perfectly fine to create multiple accounts, but you have to pay for the accounts after your first one.
See https://steemit.com/faq.html#Am_I_allowed_to_create_more_than_one_account
Of course, will spammers follow that particular guideline? Probably not.
Another way to get lots of votes is voting circles. You join a group and all agree to help each other out by upvoting each other's content.
People are pretty creative. I'm sure there will be many variations on the theme of gaming multiple votes. The point is that an account based voting system lowers the barrier to entry to the gaming system. It will make faux-upvoted content worse, not better.
A Better Answer
What I think would work better would be a sigmoidal visibility curve:
So mass votes from new accounts with little to no steem power (minnows) would have a minor effect.
Then the middle ranks (big minnows up to dolphins) of SP would have a much larger effect. By and large these are the individuals who are actively involved in STEEM and the steemit community.
The big whales would have a larger impact on visibility than the middle ranks, but not a proportionately larger effect. So BigWhale would push a piece of content up higher than DolphinA, but not higher than DolphinA and DolphinB together even if BigWhale has 100 times more SP than the combination.
There would need to be some experimentation in the exact shape of the voting curve would be, but this would be fairly easy to adjust and could be put to the witnesses as a continuous voting issue.