There's a lot of work involved there that most stakeholders would never bother with, so it's not just about highlighting authors for a small kickback to the curators while rewarding them with the majority of the rewards through curation, but also to go way and beyond to look out for those authors.
It's also no secret that manual curation, moderation and looking out for abuse doesn't really get any additional rewards here compared to just autovoting and forgetting about it, hoping someone else puts in the work.
I know :)
It was a dig toward those low effort curators who automate voting based on tags and then automate voting based on the "app" they use to publish to the chain. :)
The manual curation reward is actually reading and interacting with the content, in my mind. If people are just going to stake, autovote, and do little else, they're not really adding any value to the platform.
That's true, but there's very little ways to differentiate between the two, at least on the blockchain/protocol level. That's why different initiatives, if done well and fair, are powerful in my opinion for retention and general health of the chain.
We all know if there's rewards to be had for just being passive and doing nothing most people would get on that and there'd be very little incentive to actually look for overlooked authors and spread inflation around to more hopefully unique users.
I think that being flexible with the author reward pool can make hive stand out even more, for instance what @redditposh is doing to generate traffic towards our front-ends. Or projects like @lovesniper that look for first posts of users to see if they seem genuine to welcome and guide them and give them future curation as well as rewarding people for direct onboarding through the @ocdb posts, etc, etc.
As you say though, there are some that just throw the word "curation" around willy-nilly, maybe give the posts less than $0.01 in rewards and use their content to create compilation posts, etc, which they then attract autovoters, purchased votes through delegations/hsbi/quid-pro-quo, etc. Often very little effort if any while they monetize from others content under the guise of doing things for the platform. Those are something we should be combating imo, like that freecompliments community leader that I downvoted for a while because of direct vote buying.
There may be ways to programmatically identify auto votes - they typically always come in by the same user x minutes after post publish - whereas, I know with the people who manually vote my content - they come in outside of a precise pattern.
I think we all know (for our own stuff) who auto-votes us and who is a genuine "oh, I liked that content a lot".
I am also getting autovotes from people who haven't been on the platform for years. They're "dust".
On the topic of things like HSBI, I have quite a large number of HSBI shares. From a personal perspective, it does make me want to continue contributing to the chain (sunk cost I guess - from around the time of the steem/hive fork) - but the meagre rewards it provides to me (compared to my personal, perceived quality!) would definitely not make it worth while as a commercial or abuse vector.
But honestly, what keeps me here is the deep engagement and discussion I get to have with people who actually respond, without the fractured nature of multiple "networks" for multiple things.
The other important thing, of course, for people to get HIVE is the concept of the immutability, the fact you can see everything on chain (even if someone downvotes it!) and the positive impact it can have on people's wellbeing as social creatures who might otherwise not get any engagement at all.
They'd just get smarter if such ways were to be attempted to be identified I feel like.