Sorry, we need to go deeper. There's a wrong assumption here on a fundamental level. Curating is not a selfless act of sacrifice for the greater good that should be rewarded. It's an act of exercising cultural power. I vote for @traf because I want to see funny gifs. You vote for @trafalgar because you want to read boring essays. Traditionally, this power cost a lot of money, and it was one of the things that made the grandchildren of self-made men squander their inherited fortune.
So here's my proposal: voting should not be rewarded at all. On the contrary, it should cost money. For example, if the author reward is 100%, the voter reward should be -150%. Nobody would self-vote in this system, not even between different accounts. Voting bots would be unprofitable.
There would be no curation window, no reward pool, and no inflation but deflation instead. Wouldn't that be good for the price? And if you ask me, we can do away with Vests, Savings and SBD too. If we want mass adoption, we need a system that the average person can understand immediately.
Would nobody vote in this system? Well, a vote would become much more meaningful. We can still keep a system where the early voters of the best posts are rewarded in the end.
But we can't just assume that the most popular posts are the best. That would still enable spammers to curate the shit out of one of their posts. We need a new class of witnesses: users who judge the quality of posts by their own voting behavior. These content witnesses will be elected like the block-producing witnesses, with one difference: everybody also gets a number of downvotes in this election. That way, we can keep out users who abuse the system. The content witnesses or quality oracles will have the privilege of voting for free. There could be more than 20 full-timers, maybe 100.
Of course, this comment is inconsistent with my other comment saying we should change only one rule at a time. It's about the arguments, not about the person.
steem is beyond steemit and at this stage votes dont only have use in curation. overall, what is rewarded has been value where content is only a form of value. a developer contribution behind the scenes can be considered value and may be rewarded using the same vote. if you consider the span of these things, you will have another interesting proposal. a vote as well in current circumstance as more cost than is obvious. this is where things like real reputation or responsibility comes in. it is quite broader than is obvious especially when you start to consider steem and the shift and its evolution from where it was, to a blockchain for apps. steemit is now the major centre where all the content from various app still will show and different apps have their own business model and own form of main content. some enterprises even pay with vote too. so vote carries a broader use now than was initially the case. I think adding these factors and you will be able to come up with yet another provisional solution.
Upvoted for interesting original ideas. I don't necessarily support them at this time.