I do think a change in making the curation worth significantly more would be a great thing for this platform. There is so little (monetary) incentive now for most to engage on conversation and the authors have such few votes they can give out that they may be reluctant to reward comments from those who are genuinely trying to interact on the platform.
I think Steem Power holders should definitely be rewarded more than they are for holding the SP, which sort of reminds me of how SmartCash has SmartRewards for holding the token and not selling (or powering down or maybe even delegating). I am not sure what the ideal solution is, but I think what you have proposed with increasing the number of daily votes and increasing the curation reward are both solutions!
Absolutely. Not only that, but we might also need more practical uses for SP.
In the past, stakeholders were rewarded with "interest" on their Steem Power via massive inflation for holding those tokens. This was an absurd concept, in my opinion, since inflation simply puts downward pressure on prices, which can ultimately make the accumulated SP worth much less in the long-run. I was glad to see that abandoned but we never really saw any added incentive for holding SP. Curation rewards dropped from 50/50 to 75/25 in favor of authors (and in reality, it was 88/12), then the hyperinflation was ended.
There is little wonder why few people seem to care about curation rewards. Sharing 12% of a post payout between hundreds of users while the author alone receives 88% of the post value is a bit absurd - and it offers practically no incentive to actually search for and discover good content.
What's the result? Poor content discovery. An awful trending page. Bid bots that people delegate to in order to receive more rewards than they'd otherwise get finding that content and rewarding it themselves and at no cost at all to the authors that are now paying for that "discovery."
What are your thoughts for some practical uses for SP?
Hopefully they will increase the curation rewards sooner rather than later. I feel like Steemit, inc removed the page views partly because there were more upvotes on a post than page views, which should not make sense. With the curation trails and bid bots though this has come about.
I have not looked through the trending page in ages because it seems like it is the same authors or whoever bids the most with a bid bot.