@steemitblog (@elipowell, are you also reading here? :) , I appreciate that you are trying to find ways to support creators of good content on STEEM.
However, I fear that your offer triggers (beside honest curators) many people who see the chance to earn some easy money.

I have another idea how it could be possible to spread rewards among as many users as possible: you could analyze the voting patterns of the different STEEM users, and then select (and follow the upvotes of) these ones who are not only upvoting themselves and a few friends (or the same whale accounts again and again) but instead of that reward many different small users.

A good start could be to check the "Voting CSI" in SteemWorld, a great information tool of @steemchiller. The higher the score the better the 'voting behavior' of an account (but one should take into consideration that its calculation only reflects the last seven days). You can find it here:

One of the worst CSI scores (0.0) has for example @haejin, because more than 85 % of his voting power is used to upvote himself (and in addition he upvotes his own post with his other account @ranchorelaxo):