[Governance Poll] Reduce donut rewards for News Posts to the same as meme and media posts (0.1x multiplier)

Firstly, I understand there are a good number of genuine users who are making news posts and may have an instinct to dismiss this proposal.

Please give me a minute to try and convince you why this proposal will not hurt your earnings and is a good faith attempt that will target dishonest users as well as as improve sub content.

Objective/Problem:

To tackle vote manipulation on EthTrader - manipulators using multiple alt accounts to make 30 second news reposts, and likely using those alts to downvote other users making posts.

To improve original and quality of content on EthTrader - 95% of the posts are news repost and there is a lack of quality content on this sub.

The solution

1. Tackling vote manipulation

As said above, one problem is potential cheaters making multiple alts to make multiple news reposts which takes under a minute to do.

Firstly, by reducing incentives by 90%, this reduces what they can earn from such tactics.

Second, the way people can now 'earn' is by making original content posts or good discussions - a cheater making 20 news reposts a day with multiple alt accounts will not be able to spend that much time each day making that many good quality posts.

Third, if a cheater wants to circumvent this rule by making upvote manipulation on his news posts, that will be a lot more obvious to catch versus the situation of trying to figure out who is downvoting everyone else.

2. Improving sub content (without harming earnings and engagement of genuine users)

The 2x OC multiplier has not worked and a lot of original guides are still not getting the required upvotes to justify the effort - as a result, we've seen a drop on original content since the first month the 2x multipler came into place.

My opinion is that the main reason is because 95% the posts are flooded with news reposts which firstly reduces visibility of original posts, and second leads to problems with vote manipulations.

By reducing rewards for low-effort news reposts, you are encouraging original content to a large degree - since total Donut earnings for posts remain the same but each upvote for original posts becomes a lot more valuable (versus a news post)

3. Why post engagement will not be hurt:

The total amount of Donuts in the rewards pool will remain constant. By taking away large rewards for news posts, this means karma multiplier other flairs like original content, airdrop guides, discussion will become a lot more valuable.

If anyone has a basic knowledge of economics, and the demand-supply theory of free markets, let me break it down very simply:

A drop in quantity of posts -> 2) rewards for the small number of remaining posts increase (since total donut rewards remain constant) -> 3) members see each post becomes a lot more valuable -> 4) more posts are made to earn those additional rewards

If you still don't understand, let me put it in numbers: 1) 100 posts earns 1k rewards, each post earns 10 donuts -> engagement drop, now there are only 10 posts - but because the rewards are 1k, one post will now earn 100 donuts -> people see 100 donuts per post instead of 10, post engagement increases as people get attracted by higher rewards.

Besides, do news reposts really deserve more rewards than meme or media posts anyway?

I know there are a lot of genuine users making news posts, but my opinion is that this is a necessary step to improve our sub and I think engagement will not be as hurt as badly as some people think for reasons stated above.

The choices are:

· [YES]

· [ABSTAIN]

· [NO]