You make some good points here, kind of a shame it's buried in some comments only AI bots will read sometime in the future ;) However, I do think the way you describe curation as it stands currently plays out differently depending on the bracket of person doing it based on parameters of SP and total SP of active followers. If for example, someone that has enough SP to push anything into the 'Hot' section of whichever category it is in (or has many followers) they can act as a curator through promoting undiscovered posts with their large upvote or by resteeming it. It is a large incentive for big votes to go to small authors, and this does not have anything to do with the 30 minute window and is also the ideal case for curation - a situation where some random person making large effort with low payout gets noticed and the person with large SP has a big enough incentive to dive in on their post that is sitting at $0.01 payout instead of upvoting something that already has attention. In the current system it could even be 3 hours after it was posted and people can do this now, in the case of followers anyone can do it with resteems. The problem is that for low-SP people with no followers this doesn't do anything, because upvoting something by a few cents isn't going to help it get noticed so the optimal path is to jump in front of other voters on already popular posters instead. However, the current system diminishes curation rewards from this because of the reverse-auction and people participating in piling on to one author undercut each other until only a small portion remains, even better if it goes on to trending people only upvote the post if they actually like it (or don't realize they aren't getting curation for it, I guess), because by the time a post is on trending you will get basically zero curation for upvoting it.

Despite bots always optimizing in any scenario, the current one pushes people away from piling into trending posts without reading them, which is a very very good thing. The incentives for larger votes to move to smaller authors are also very important, even if it only happens a fraction of the time. People don't do it much because like you say it's a gamble and gaining small amounts in predictable rates is psychologically more appealing than gaining large amounts infrequently, but top curators of steemit are able to find posts nobody noticed and push them up to the top and take a huge reward for doing it, which they should if people are ever expected to dig through infinite spam posts looking for one that's actually good. The way I would really like to see this improve is extending beyond the 7 day period where people can gain some kind of curation bonus for digging up older posts, because the current system is weighted to early posts. (I mention someone pushing a post to hot with a single vote but after a day or two that's almost impossible) After 7 days it doesn't matter if you dig up a gem you and the author get nothing, this seems like a major problem to me.

I think even if the curation mechanic is altered in some way the incentives should never align to voting onto something that already has $1000 payout. You shouldn't get any reward for something like upvoting the most upvoted post, and saying it like that makes me wonder if I even understand your idea as it was intended. If I can just look at the top payout posts and mindlessly upvote all of them it's not the kind of thing to be rewarded, and if people all pile on to upvoting the same author that always has high upvotes as soon as they make a new post it should also have less reward, which is why I like the reverse auction cutting down rewards. I think in an ideal scenario everyone would be trying to dig up gems regardless of their own SP and regardless of the chances it gets noticed any time soon. How it is possible to do that I would imagine has something to do with the long-term performance of a post based on views/upvotes extending beyond 7 days. I dig up a gem that has $0.05 on day 7 but goes on to be viewed 100,000 times then maybe I'm a good curator with low SP, but if I go to trending and upvote the top 10 posts every day I'm the worst curator ever. Seriously that is the worst curator ever, lol.

Maybe my interpretation of your idea is off a bit, but that is the way I interpret it, that after the change I could go to trending and mindlessly upvote all the top posts to get bigger rewards, and in that scenario the curator with a lot of steem power could get the same reward piling on to trending post as digging up a gem and pushing it into trending himself. For example a post with $1000 payout and he adds $10, or a post with $0.01 and he adds $10, to get the same reward he then has to push it up to having $1000 like the other just to break even on opportunity cost - a nearly impossible task for any curator to do so why even bother the best strategy is to just pile on to the biggest post. Despite front runners, this is not how the best curators of steemit currently work. They actually do search for hidden gems and actually do push them from pennies to hundreds, it just doesn't happen as often as it should.

Major issue of the snowballing mechanic is we currently have posts getting up into the $1500 range and they are pushed to the top of trending in general category on front page of steemit, so they already get a lot of exposure and extra money from it in a system where people have incentive to go vote on something that has much less payout if they expect any curation reward at all, so if it did the opposite the posts would have $5000 payouts instead and an ever increasing incentive to pile on to try grabbing a piece.

Maybe I don't understand what you mean exactly but to me it sounds like the little guys would struggle even more from that because most of their growth comes from posting, but all of the votes would gravitate to all of the other votes, and even if that happens some already if you find a post right now that is $25 with 100 votes are you going to try getting curation from it? No that would be silly, you should go for the post next to it that has $0.01 instead, and that is kinda the point I have about spreading the rewards around. Between the two scenarios and just looking at 2 posts you can see the difference between each is that in one system the votes spread between the 2 posts because of the incentives pushing people away from the post that already has high payout and in the other all the votes pile on to the same post polarizing the rewards into an all or nothing distribution. It's like, if you are not already successful you may as well give up.

Well, at least in that scenario voting bots would be really profitable :)

Anyway, thank you for writing all of this to me, I read it all and probably will again later when I'm not so tired so I can think about it more. From my perspective you want to see it improve and have something in mind to improve it, so I try to poke at the idea and maybe it grows. I also want to see it improve and hope the version number 0.20 is an indication that many changes are ahead in time. Again I want to say I do not mean any of this to discredit you but just to convey the way I imagine this kind of system in comparison to the (flawed) one we have now. I certainly would be interested to see it actually happen in an experimental way to go beyond hypothetical situations and theory and actually witness the effects, but I think this is the best we can do for now, just imagining the change and explaining whatever comes to mind from each perspective.

In the end we can both agree there are some problems in current curation and so I think it's a good sign to see curation is at least on their radar for active development. Maybe in time it will become more advanced :)