I haven't thought about it this way, but you are right. By giving users more flexibility to use their votes whenever they feel like or when they find something worth their votes, it does encourage more manual curation instead of delegating the stake away to curation projects or following curation trails.
There are other benefits too, one of which was remarked by someone in the comments section. Downvote trails from people without any stake in HIVE anymore (or minimum), who DV left and right automatically run out of voting mana much quicker. That makes the entire space less toxic in my opinion, even though their DVs didn't have much of an influence, other than psychological for the readers and sometimes for those being DV-ted.
Though I rarely used them, that was first thing I tested. Found a reasonable place to drop downvotes nonstop. 100% sure they wouldn't mind. Didn't take me long before I was already chewing up my upvote mana, using downvotes. Gets to a point you're hitting yourself, rather quickly. I didn't drain everything but I know if I had kept going, I'm putting myself in timeout.
The incentive to be responsible exists.
Curating manually has always been my method. So I can say from experience, this is better. No thinking involved. No strategy needed. Something catches my eye, I enjoy it, I vote. Done deal. Simple.
Now if more were actually out there doing this, the incentive to create attractive content exists.
And if you don't like doom scrolling, simply mute all the repetitive creators that seem to get in the way and clog up the feeds. Don't want to be ignored? The incentive to be responsible exists. Creating content too difficult? Relax. Stick around. Voting and commenting yields rewards, and it's easy.
Still new and everything is fresh but so far, feels like things are a lot more fair and balanced. Time will tell, of course. I hope to see an improvement. It's up to everyone else to decide where they want to go with this.
It's great to have options. The 7-day window for rewards still incentivizes (forces?) authors to write often. It would be fantastic if in a future HF or on a 2nd layer, a solution would be found to reward evergreen pieces. Until then, it's up for curators in the system we have now to better surface both time-sensitive and evergreen content.
People have been able to support creators directly for a very long time. That's a rare occurrence. Without a sizeable consumer base roaming around, people are unlikely to find that support. Even if curation placed it front and center.
I'll return to rigid guidelines. Not many think outside of that box. If the content creator wants long term support, all they have to do is ask. Set up a subscription model for yourself. If people see value in that, they'll pay for it. It's not up to the system to do these things for people. The tools and options exist. Pick them up and use them.
People also have the ability to leave a comment under an old post, then upvote the author's response. Wouldn't be wise to upvote 5 year old content. Don't even know if that author is there anymore, until they respond.
I'm not sure what makes people think every upvote needs to contribute to curation. The upvote is curation, the rewards are support. That button performs two things, not one. It's flexible. But again, it's up to the people to think outside of the box.
Any system offering long term rewards first needs money coming in the door to pay for those rewards. I've been stressing the importance of building a sizeable consumer base locally for nearly a decade.
People forgot how to busk and build an audience. It doesn't require advanced technical solutions to solve a simple problem.