There have been a lot of discussions lately about the curation incentives which are clearly not working as intended... same content and authors trending everyday, no rewards for discovering good content early,etc.
The problem is that the curation algorithm didn't anticipate that people would form small circle and jerk each other off.
And because people are acting selfishly curating has become the least profitable way to make money on steemit.
So how do we realign curation incentives ? Simple, by making curating less predictable and more profitable.
My suggestion is to let authors decide how much rewards they want to allocate to curators.
New authors could chose to give say 80% of the rewards to curators which will make their posts more appealing to voters.
So now you have a good incentive for users to diversify their vote and you also give a fantastic new tool for newbies to get their content discovered. Win win
I believe this could rebalance the whole ecosystem and I'm very curious to know if the SMT protocol will be flexible enough to allow these tweaks.
Curating is supposed to be fun and exciting, let's make it so!