Upvoted for the thoughtful reply. Although I don't agree with some of them. I'm not fighting with you as well :)
Quantity of pure readers is more than voters, which is more than people who comment, which is more than bloggers.
Generally, I think well-designed incentive mechanisms are better than no incentive at all, which is better than bad-designed incentive mechanisms. That said, incentives should be aligned. Rewarding little to curators means no incentive, which encourages doing nothing, or worse, vote buying, although vote buying is not always a bad thing. Over-rewarding is usually counter productive as well. Anyway, capital will find its way out.