In regards to diminishing returns on voting for the same authors, I understand how this could alleviate problems with botting, but doesn't this diminish the value of Steemit as a social media platform? It's not incorrect to say that many users follow a few "favorite" people that may post things that they like, and upvote just about everything that author posts. Naturally, this shouldn't be for the sole purpose of making money, but I feel as if it's unfair for users to profit less from voting on specific authors again and again. Perhaps a more efficient way to alleviate the problem in a similar, but fairer, way would be to check the actual quantity of authors that a user commonly votes on versus their votes on authors that they may not have upvoted before. This would allow for a better analysis of how diversed someone is in their voting, however I must admit it sounds pretty difficult in terms of developing this method, it's just an idea to be thought on.
RE: Voting Abuse and Ineffective Curation: A proposal for blockchain-level change