I've been away from Steem for a while, and coming back to find there is now plenty of content available. The problem is that I don't necessarily want to give the same amount of voting power to every post I upvote. This makes for a strange curating experience: after upvoting a couple of posts that I find interesting, touching or funny but not that deeply important, I stumble upon the post that I find really outstanding, but I can't give it any more weight than I gave to any of the not that important posts before it.
How could we change that and make it possible for curators to decide how much of their voting power they want to give to each post they upvote without making things complicated? Well there is an easy way. It should be possible to vote any number of times for a post in the same reward cycle. Let's take an example: I have already voted 1x for a lolcat meme, and 2x for a introduceyourself post: so far they are getting 33% and 66% of my votes respectively. Next, if I run into a more profound post about say some political matter, I may want to give it 3x so that it gets 50% of my votes, the cat gets 16.6% and the new joiner 33.3%. Further down the line, if I run into the post which I want to support wholeheartedly, I could give it 54x and dilute my votes on the three first posts. The latter would get 90% of my voting for this cycle, the cat 1.66%, the new joiner 3.33% and the political post 5%.
Like with the current system, votes matter only in proportion of the number of votes I casted in total for this cycle, but because I can cast multiple votes on the same post, I am able to adjust my rewards to the relative importance of each post.
For things to be intuitive, the dialogue should show some sort of circular gauge / pie chart that shows the user how many percents of her voting power so far is being commited. For user-friendliness reasons, it needs not have exact %age written on it: a simple graphic gauge to get a rough idea will be enough so that all the user needs to do is click the upvote button as many times as she feels like until the jauge has hit a level that feels right. It could also be the occasion to play on the "steam" metaphore by using a barometer as steem power gauge.
For more advanced curators, it could also be useful to have a page that lists all the posts that have been upvoted for this cycle. That would allow to adjust the number of votes given to each post at the end of the Steemit session.