will it disencentivize curators to look for new authors and content though? it could lead to people just voting the authors they're comfortable with and not look for anything new for higher rewards.
that's the problem with these big accounts maximizing now too, they're just focused on ROI so they don't share rewards with curators to go out and actually look for new authors and content but settle on voting the 3rd or 4th post of accounts that stop receiving autovotes after the 2nd post or so (usual hive.voter rules) to then vote up whatever content that is to receive highest ROI for least effort.
Actually, I think the opposite would be the case! :)
NOW most upvotes are given automatically with the only purpose to be a) early and b) upvote popular authors with the hope that many upvotes may follow.
If that wouldn't play a role anymore, real curators could focus on what they like! They knew they would get curation rewards according to the weights of their votes, anyway.
A vote wouldn't be wasted anymore on an unknown author, even if given late, even if nobody else would follow!
I see what you're saying but I don't think the opposite is incentivized.
Like yes, it would be great for late votes but my fear is that those doing the actual work to look for new authors and content wouldn't have an advantage over just casting their vote on "whatever they like" and it would come to a cost for retention of newcomers. In fact it would incentivize automated voting even more and distribution would be even worse as autovotes would just keep stacking on whatever's on trending or on its way there.
Right now we at least have some "smart" front-runners that keep changing authors now and then if that author got re-frontrun by other curators/trails. Removing the window completely would make these actions obsolete so they wouldn't have a reason to ever change and just let it auto roll on whoever was lucky at the time to get their votes. The competition for ROI and diversity would be removed, something that the penalty is the reason to right now.
The million $ question is how can we fix or incentivize better usage with the rules we have now or some slight changes that wouldn't break a lot of other things that are working today.
But at least more people would 'dare' to upvote what they like! Maybe they wouldn't upvote posts like this, this or this one anymore?
I guess many users feel bad about their own voting behaviour but think they had to do so to claim their part of the 'rewards cake'.
Yes, some users would upvote just anything (and some others could flag then that 'anything'), but I think the majority would be happy to have the new freedom to explore new posts and be able to reward them without the bad conscious of wasting curation rewards.
If you earned the same amount of money anyway: what would you upvote, a shit post of an overpaid popular user or a great travel report of a newbie?
Don't you think the majority would do the same?