2)The reverse auction system actually rewards the using of bots.
This has been discussed many times before. The reverse auction was created to discourage bots claiming the majority of rewards by immediately voting on new posts. However it may actually disincentivise people voting manually. The cognitive load of calculating whether you should vote or not based on the timing is an extra hassle for people.
Even worse:
I log in, go to my feed, see a post I like!
"Shit... it's only 2 minutes old. I'll be denied any rewards if I vote on it now, I'll come back in a little bit and upvote it further down the auction. "
4 hours later:
Crap, I forgot to go back and upvote that post... ah well, no point now... too far down the voting pool to make my vote worth any of the rewards. Best to save it for something fresher.
Exactly:)
What's worse... SO MANY don't even know about or understand the reverse auction. Especially minnows. So there's a high chance they will be blowing their votes, seeing very little return, and just giving up on curation. Wrote a whole post on it, but I'm still fairly new and my exposure hasn't really grown. Glad to see others fighting the good fight and getting the message out, lol.
I think a lot of talk about it happened when it was implemented, and a lot of the people who have been around now just assume everyone knows about it since it was talked about THEN so much. I didn't find anything about it until well after a month of being here.
Having a full on "Here's how everything actually works!" page on the site itself would likely be a really good start.
Yes lack of understanding how everything works is a big problem.
Also, the ability to follow a category/tag as well as individuals.... would make new author exposure more likely.
I could go on and on with these ideas.... lol.
I think that will come with the communities feature which is supposed to be this year.
A very simple way to help make the reverse auction less problematic, is to distribute the forfeited curation rewards to the OTHER voters instead of the author.