RE: A case for eliminating curation rewards
I agree with a lot of things you said , you made a good analysis of the situation.
However to me this is the wrong strategy for mainstream adoption, because it only attracts money opportunists who have no interest in developing their friends/family circle on steemit. They come here with only one purpose which is to make money. This is why steemit is not growing because people see steemit as a site to make money, a bit like gambling, they don't see it as a social media site.
You said
Without these curators, Thousands of users left ignored with zero exposure
This is good actually. If a new users doesn't get any reward it is a good sign, however when a newbie receives 20 votes at the same time from random stranger the system looks fake af
In any social media site new users have to build their audience, they have to build their communities, their friend,family circle in order to get upvotes. Here on steemit they don't need any of this, it is just a lottery, you post something, sometimes you win sometimes you don't but there is no incentives to build your community.
If curation rewards are eliminated it would allow for natural growth, active users would have more power and people who post here will have to engage more to get upvotes, they will have to bring their family/friends over in order to get upvotes from them, and since users will have more influence it will encourage everyone to buy steem.
If steemit want real growth influence will have to be made available to active users so that these users can build their little communities and grow from there. This is the only way you are going to scale to millions of users and make steemit attractive to the average person.
This site assumes that people want to share stuff with strangers,etc..some people don't want to be part of the whole thing they just want to be with their friends and upvote each other's content. To me this is the only logical way to scale, because it is a natural way, whether their is money or not involved that's how people use social media site.
I feel everything you are looking for is actually achieved by the incentive of curation rewards. I agree with most of it, and I'm confident that curation rewards go some way in achieving our common goal.
The big elephant in the room is the complete lack of concerted marketing and outreach programs to actually bring in new users. Indeed, curation rewards are a novel idea that may encourage millions of users to sign up.
Let's see how the system functions at a representative scale - millions of users. Again, like I said, with the Communities feature coming in the end of the year, we can think of eliminating voting rewards for more direct curation/moderation rewards.
Till then, we'll have to agree to disagree about the impact of curation rewards. :)
Curation rewards encourages people to vote for post outside of their circle/communities, they achieves the opposite of what I am looking for.