I think you underestimate the returns that can be made from voting, especially if curation rewards were bumped to 50% or more. I think we would see a lot less shitposting from invested users and a lot more curation. Generally speaking, creating a post takes a lot more time than scrolling through your feed and voting on the content from your favorite authors.

Just as an example, with very minimal effort, I can earn about 25-30 SP each week just from voting on a handful of posts per day from my feed. If I put in a little more time and slightly tweaked my strategy, I could probably get that to 40 SP or more. Now this is with curation rewards at less than 25% - probably closer to half of that. If we were to double that reward (even assuming that you're now only getting 25% instead of 50% of the post rewards, due to the reverse auction), then I could potentially earn 80 SP per week.

80 x $2.40 (current STEEM price) = $192/week

And the SP is continuously compounded. Even if it wasn't compounded, I could make 4160 SP per year just from voting on content. At a $5 STEEM price, that's $400 per week or $20,800 per year. If this could be done without ever having to write a single word on a post, I think a lot of people would be interested. If that profit could be further increased by guaranteeing a 50% split - which would represent another potential doubling of rewards to curators - we would have a huge incentive to not only curate, but to curate better.

We would also have a lot more people curating content, which would help with wider allocation/distribution and likely better discovery overall. Of course, this would also require some other changes, such as the ones I've proposed in my post. Changing curation rewards alone won't help us achieve any kind of "ideal" voting behaviors.

I have toyed with the idea of how scrapping curation rewards altogether would work.

I can save you the trouble: It wouldn't work.

If there were no curation rewards at all, then there would be no economic incentive to hold Steem Power except to upvote yourself. And if we were all incentivized to simply upvote ourselves, there would be nothing at all "social" about this platform. I would argue that we're already trending in that direction with the current protocols, partly because curation rewards are already closer to zero than they ought to be.

Anyway, look what you have made me do. Write a big long comment like it was 2017. For shame ;O)

Dammit. You tricked me into doing the same thing! How does that make you feel???