"If you remove curation rewards what you are left with is a "shotgun DPOS" model which is basically a lazy PoS with voting rights.
Shotgun DPOS = Instead of passive token creation, you must manually upvote ten times a day (vote selling/delegation to bidbots are maxing ROI in STEEM in current setup)"
I disagree. Remove curation rewards and you preclude curation as a mechanism to reduce incentive to reward quality content creators, because curation rewards add incentive for vote selling and rent seeking delegations rather than actual curation - which is to selectively reward that content the voter finds of greatest value. Curation rewards directly oppose that stated purpose by instead creating incentive to sell votes, delegate, self-vote, circle jerk, and the like, none of which are actually curative. The content most financially rewarding becomes that rewarded with upvotes, and this has no relationship to any other qualitative assessment of the content.
"Now, if you want to remove curation, you would need to remove the upvote IMO because it becomes an obstacle. Just call it what it is, remove author rewards and curation all together and have the inflation go to interest paid to SP stake hodlers. Make the staking rewards liquid so you can donate to content creators you want. It is the same thing, forcing people to upvote with low curation rewards is just a janky system. The flaw here is it turns into a weird POS system, where only hodlers get paid just for hodling, BPs get paid, and that's it, so the token distribution turns to absolute shit. DPOS with poor token distribution becomes sour over time."
Elimination of curation rewards does not eliminate curation, nor author rewards, only a mechanism for reducing distribution/rent seeking. Curation rewards are additive to author rewards in rent seeking self-voting, circle jerks and botvoting, and add incentive to do those things, rather than to actually curate content. I do not note that the vast majority of the Steem community upvotes in order to receive curation rewards (because with limited SP curation rewards are inconsequential, and cannot be made consequential), but for other reasons, such as they simply like the content and want to create incentive for the creator to continue creating it. Those that primarily upvote for curation rewards demonstrably have little or no interest in curation per se, but nothing more beneficial to the community than rent seeking.
I do not see any value whatsoever in that to either the Steem community or society as a whole. Indeed, the reverse is true - I see that as harmful to the Steem community and society in general. Therefore I advocate elimination of curation rewards because they directly create a reverse incentive to actually curate, and instead add to the incentive to seek rent.
I believe that reducing author rewards towards a mean would be beneficial for various reasons as well. Substantial stakeholders are able to self vote and delegate to bots as a means of seeking rent in the present system, and limiting rewards would dramatically reduce incentive to do that, while not financially impacting the vast majority of content creators, so not reducing the incentive to produce quality content.
A better incentive for substantial stakeholders would be availed by enabling delegation to the Steem Alliance foundation to fund development profitably (whatever form that eventually takes. Designing appropriate incentive for such delegation depends on the form that foundation takes, but generally enabling delegations to participate in business proceeds from dApps, or capital gains from improving Steem development is the general idea). Anything that creates incentive to produce capital gains, rather than enabling rent extraction, would not only improve the quality of content on Steem as well as distribution of Steem, but also the quality of substantial stakeholders. IMHO we are plagued with dilletantes to investing, who grasp little beyond profiteering. More experienced investors would be very likely to better fund development well targeted to improving and growing the market for Steem, which, of course, is what all of us here want.
Appropriate algorithms can be employed to increase or reduce rewards delivered by upvotes depending on the total upvote value, with an eye towards providing total author rewards approaching a mean. There is no need for unlimited author rewards, nor is there any reason to advocate that content should receive paltry rewards, except for plagiarism and spam. Even trolls put in effort and (IMHO) are generally entertaining, and thus add value to Steem, our community, and society in general. Something like the 3% minimum and 300% maximum of mean income Huey Long (before he was assassinated. Don't kill me!) proposed would be achievable algorithmically, and greatly improve incentives to create quality content without creating incentives to self vote, circle jerk, or seek rent through vote bots.
Thanks!