I'll have to think about curation trails a bit more. As you know I've been a bit obsessed with paid-upvoting lately, but this is probably part of the puzzle.

While you get a curation reward from voting on the trail, it's not quite the same as delegating to a bidbot - I think. (If someone wants to correct me I'm fine with that).

But it does mean that you don't watch everything you vote on. Yes, as you correctly point out, if everyone cast all of their votes via curation trails, and never manually voted, then we'd watch/read much less.

Some people might think this isn't a problem - after all, everyone still gets paid. But eventually, post payouts must start to reflect views and engagement if we ever want to really compete other social media.

The whole thing reminds me of the the role of advertising in the dot-com bubble - people invested heavily in advertising, thinking they could generate much higher returns than were actually possible. Reality setting in was a big part of that crash.

We don't want to see the same thing here, where people invest heavily in the mistaken hope that lots of people will view their content. Yes, they might still be a decent return on their time and money (though without spending up big on SP and bidbots, I doubt it), but an 'attention economy' where no one is paying attention? Sounds...problematic.

Creators who are as interested (or more) in being seen as being paid might sense the opportunity cost and take their money and ability to attract people to the network elsewhere - and we don't want that.

Alternatively, that was all just off the top of my head, and I could be completely wrong.