I'll start this off with stating that some of the ideas I'm going to propose will probably be taken very poorly at first glance by authors and content creators, but please read and try to see my perspective as a fellow content creator and curator. I've had discussions with and read issues from many whales and other curators and the problem with reward distribution is serious. Hopefully this will shed some light on why I think we need to change some things and possibly offer a valid solution to the problem. Feel free to share your thoughts or discuss them below. I'm also going to include the witness tag to hopefully get some feedback on ability to change these things.
Post rewards are currently heavily in favor of the author and it makes investment in the platform and curation unprofitable. Personally I curate and create content because I like doing it, but many people are motivated by the money. There is nothing wrong with being motivated by the money, but when we do not balance the division of those funds appropriately we end up with the situation we are in now. People that have the ability to upvote quality content and curate feel no need to as they are literally losing money in the process. It is not sustainable or even responsible of us to expect benefactors to just give us money at their own expense.
I propose changing the reward distribution from post to a drastically more conservative option such as 35% author and 65% curator rewards. I know at first glance that can be a shocking number and it took me a long time to wrap my mind around this, but here's why I feel it's necessary. It needs to be more profitable to upvote content than it is to sell votes. That's simple logic to a big problem, but I don't think it needs to be more complicated than that. We are all pretty aware of the problem right now with vote selling and as much as I oppose bid bots and vote selling, it's a valid response to the unfair distribution of curation rewards. If we swap the percentages to heavily favor curation, we put the bulk of monetary gain coming from upvoting other's posts and quality content. It stops a lot of the circle jerk voting, because the author is not being over compensated and the curators and whales can then focus on quality content. For steemit as an idea to succeed I feel we need to change the motivation of how wealth is created from hoarding to giving and sharing. Namaste.