The concentration of author rewards into the hands of the same old small circle of authors is a common complaint. After the introduction of the EIP (Economic Improvement Proposal) in September 2019, which killed the bid bot industry, there seems to have been a clear increase in the number of authors voted on by large accounts such as former bid bots turned into curation projects. Never have author rewards been spread as far and wide than after September 2019. That is why I don't take most of the talk about circle jerks seriously. Just show me a platform where none of this happens.
A common misconception is that it is easy to maximize curation rewards by voting on posts that are known to attract a large vote mass. That is not the case because the more authors there are trying to front run each other the smaller shares of the large curation reward pie each voter gets. It is this very competition where curators try to front run each other that frustrates the maximizers sufficiently to look for other authors to curate.
Some people have considered the reluctance of curators to vote on posts that have already received a large vote mass on them to be a problem. The reason for this being a problem is thought to be the most valuable posts not earning as much as they deserve.
This is the top of trending right now:
Do you see many posts that deserve a lot more?
I've heard the argument against the spreading out votes on new and unknown authors that some of these people are not actually new but sock puppets of old authors.
My answer to this is that anyone is welcome to try and create an alt account and see how easy it is to maximize your earnings by using your alt for posting. It won't be easy because a new account will have no followers and creating a following is painfully slow and difficult. You'll be lucky if a large curator notices your post. In fact, I'd say such complaints are rather amusing. Just try it and you'll see rather quickly what I mean.
Some people have said creating alts for authoring posts is "cheating". According to them, posting from alts allows one to skirt "limits" on how much it is appropriate to post. Let's clear up one thing. There are no such limits on Hive. Anyone can post as much as they like. There is no harm in doing so. Your auto-voters have limits in place on how many times per day and week you get their automated vote. The platform will not suffer from more content posted on it. On the contrary, this platform suffers from a lack of content owing to the small number of users. Content begets engagement. The more there is engagement the easier it is to attract new users. That is what this platform desperately needs in order to generate value independently from the HIVE token being a speculative vehicle for altcoin traders.
In conclusion, there is no need for a major overhaul on the curation system on Hive. The EIP was the result of years of discussions and carefully considering many factors. It's a pretty well-balanced system. I'd say it's only weakness is that most users do not use their downvotes enough. That's because it's a hard and thankless job to look for abuse on the platform and downvote it. No one will sing the praises of the downvoters. On the contrary, one risks retaliatory downvotes for all the time and effort expended.
I wouldn't favor any improvements that rely on the large-scale use of downvoting. Our experience is that Hive users tend to be rather lazy downvoters. So, if the variable curator/author reward ratio off-chain solution developed recently is going to rely on downvoters diligently doing their job, then I would warn against relying on that.