OH MY GOD.

Not to, like, freak out, but I feel betrayed.

It already feels like the wealthiest members of this community receive a lot more $ relative to their effort than the users who put in the most thought and built the communities that keep people coming back do, but... that's just a fair unfairness, kind of built into the idea of Proof of Stake.

Fine. But this is the first I'm learning about a dust threshold.

I'm not particularly worried about spammers making $10/month with 10k dumb comments. They are obnoxious, but they get downvoted into invisibility, and there's some cost to creating those accounts, some time expenditures anyway. Blah. Not my point.

I think you'll still get spammers by raising the threshold. I'm not sure why you think the threshold would get rid of spam in the first place. Obviously there is a threshold, and there is spam.

What the threshold does, and what it will continue do, and what it will do even more severely if you raise the threshold, is it will limit distribution of the stake. I think one of the biggest problems facing Steemit is the wealth concentrated in the hands of a very narrow group of people. The content that is attractive to most people in the wider world has little to do with dev and crypto. And yet, those posts are the biggest payout... or whatever someone buys votes on. 

What do I think you should do? I'm not an economist, but I think the problem is this concentration of wealth to some extent. I can see three possible solutions.

The first is what I think the wealthiest few would be most willing to do: Delegate their SP to trusted users who have different interests than they do. People whose posts and votes go to content that we can all agree aren't spam, but who aren't devs/crypto enthusiasts. And, to combat the spam problem, to a team of humans, devs and bots who will accurately identify spam and downvote it to oblivion. (Maybe a bot to identify potential spam that a human can make a real decision about... don't want to discourage newbies if their enthusiasm triggers a bot). Think of this as the charity solution?

The second, probably less welcome solution, is for these wealthiest to destroy their wealth by sending it to a null account, thereby resetting the percentage of awards pool. This would obviously not work unless folks really did it together. And an unhealthy ecosystem could still arise, with the same or different folks in power, but it's still something possible without changing too much. This is in individuals hands.

The third would be a fork that directly taxed and sent back to the rewards pool SP above a certain amount. Like, if you had more than 10,000SP, each week .1% of the SP in your account, and 10% of your earnings would get returned to the rewards pool to be redistributed. This is the tax solution. I like this best, though it may seem a bit less libertarian than other notions, because it is a perpetually self-correcting system. There's an incentive to use your SP to raise others, because it's more efficiently used that way than to raise yourself. After a certain level, there's less incentive to buy votes, and you can still sell your liquid funds to those who want more power more quickly.

A bit of the first and third would both serve to protect against spam, and would help the system stay universally appealing in the long run.