The problem is that as a manual curator, who really tries to evaluate a post before upvoting it, you will be always behind the huge army of automated profit maximizers (even in the very rare cases that you found potential interesting posts shortly after they had been published). That's simply a fact, and if you don't believe it, ask users like @acidyo who have tried both methods and then compared the generated curation rewards (and by the way no auto-upvoter upvotes a minute after post release).
The 5 minute rule is not the culprit in encouraging auto voting.
I disagree. Having a larger 'curation window' the probability would be much higher that a manual curator noticed a post before the time of maximal curation reward had been reached. This alone would be an advantage compared to a very small curation window. Furthermore, as already mentioned, it's nearly not possible to find, read and evaluate a post within the first five minutes after its appearance.
The mechanic where early voters earn a percentage of subsequent voters curation rewards is the root of auto votes.
Here I agree. And that's why I suggest that curation rewards should be independent of the date of the upvotes and upvotes of other users.
I really wonder how easy it would be to implement a curation window depending on word size of post, this would of course not work well for videos and those 5 page footers with donation addresses some people like to make but yeah. Or give authors the option to set the window before posting.
But why a window at all?
I often notice great posts a day or even later after they have been published, but it's me who takes the time to read, evaluate, comment them and then decide if/how strong I upvoted them (that's real curation work), whereas many other upvoters don't even know that they have upvoted the post, but nevertheless get more curation rewards only because their auto-upvote programs noticed the post faster than my slow human eye. :)
You may also read what I wrote concerning my insect community.
For now I adopted the following method: when I see a great post with many auto-votes, especially by bots like for example @upmewhale or @appreciator (yes, sometimes they accidentally also upvote great stuff), I place a comment in which I ask the author to write a comment. Then I upvote this comment to support the author without increaasing the curation rewards of the curation maximizers (/vote sellers etc.).
without a window the maximizers would have it even easier by voting on popular authors at the same block/ 0-3 seconds. and yes, they some times vote up posts if they have very little rewards (close to 0) as that's what gets them a nice ROI, so best would be if you could downvote their main posts a bit and then upvote a comment, but of course you're going to need considerable stake for that to be worth it as it's not easy to get past the curve tax
With my idea, described in the post, it wouldn't be an advantage anymore to upvote popular authors!
One could freely upvote whatever one likes because with a linear 'curation curve' there was no need anymore to care about the date of an upvote or the upvotes of other users!
As the curve for author rewards would still be convergent linear, it would still be worth it to create great 'quality content'.
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.
PS. Still manually curating here for 4+ years, only tested the automated version on shteem