There have been influence caps on STEEM before. It took the form of "@abit's experiment" or what @dantheman referred to as the "whale truce," as well as this new Anti-Self-Voting notion.
Concerning their intended purpose, these implementations were/are okay because they are enforced entirely off-chain by their own stake.
So when I say that influence caps are dumb, I am only referring to a hypothetical on-chain influence cap that directly affects STEEM POWER.
You see, these off-chain implementations can be circumvented by third parties or other circumstances, in theory. That's a feature, not a bug. And they can be turned off under certain conditions, as we have observed.
Image Source: deviantart.com
Any on-chain influence cap is the doctrine that users have no right to vote for their own sake, that the users' stake and their curation rewards do not belong to them, but belongs to the platform, that the only justification of their existence is their service to the platform, and that the platform may dispose of them in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its collective good.
We are now seeing a new kind of influence cap idea emerging: Anti-Promotion-Bots
It seems like a more focused cap on the surface, but really, it's all the same. As much as @abit (probably) helped the reward pool, I'm delighted it didn't become part of the protocol.
I hope we never hardfork to any on-chain influence cap for STEEM POWER.
Yes, I get it. There are a bunch of examples where lousy content is getting upvotes. But that's always a problem, and we already have tools to deal with it (flags). I don't understand why there's a focus on bad-self-up-votes, though. Bad content is bad content, who cares if it's self-voted?
I also realize that this "problem" supposedly became a big deal because of the move away from quadratic. It opened up more vectors of bad content getting bigger payouts. But it also opened up the possibility of more people casting meaningful flags as well.
Linear is a double-edged sword. Now that more people can affect more rewards, they should also wield flags. But they don't.
Direct Flagging Incentives
So the real problem is that not enough people are casting those flags. They're only upvoting because there's no direct incentive to flag.
Do we need a direct incentive to flag? No. Just like a restaurant owner has no direct incentive to keep their store clean. They get paid to sell items on their menu. There's a direct incentive for that. There is no item on the menu for "clean the bathroom."
I see flagging the same way: you do it because you need to do it.
The people who want to return to quadratic, in reality, they're just saying they don’t want to flag.