About going back to higher curation rewards; repeating a comment here so you see it:
I'm not so sure. Given the current goings-on on Steemit, I think the most likely scenario will be that:
- blind voting-for-profit will go up, and stay well within the existing voting patterns, some of which are circle jerks;
- voting-because-one-likes-content will go down;
- average Steemians rewards from voting will move from negligable to twice negligable;
- their rewards for posting content will go down.
I don't think increasing the curator's cut will increase proper curating, it will just increase the rewards for those who vote for rewards only rather than for rewarding content they like.
I suspect all it would do is make the in-crowds and short-term ROI-seekers work slightly differently, while at the same time increasing the income of those who vote for profit and decreasing the rewards for content creators.
The long-term/short-term outlook of those with the big wallets is key here, not the percentages.
There's only one way to find out what would happen, so we could just try it, as long as it can be reversed when it doesn't work as intended. Nothing wrong with experimenting as long as you say beforehand what you will do with the outcome of the experiment.
And yes, the huge STINC stake is hanging over everything like a big, black cloud.
How large is it? maybe you could save half of hour of research?
I also think or better believe or even better hope, that once Steemit will split into small shards of communities with SMTs all of them building their own token distribution and adjusted reward mechanism all that voting in steemit will not matter that much anymore.
I took me a few weeks after finding about steemit to realise that the real value lies in Blockchain itself and not Steemit as a platform. I guess only time will tell.
Apart from that i keep my reward expectations low and i'm cool. So many smart, interesting, creative and kind people here that it alone surpass benefits from the rewards. All the knowledge i have gained from advises, tips, tuts is priceless.