Hey @ats-david - I appreciate you doing such a good job articulating the opposite view. Regardless of which side we land on, I feel that this has been a very healthy discussion for the community to have - and one that has added a lot of value.

There is no specific content – other than what can be wildly popular and trending outside of the platform – that can “raise the value” of STEEM/Steemit, and that is mostly dependent on the content attracting new users who will then add to the overall work on the site.

Whether you are for or against curation rewards, this really should be what we are all aiming for. To keep or eliminate them is essentially a question of which method is going to do a better job achieving that goal.

A curating bot or a curating human serves the same purpose and essentially does the same work for the platform.

If you put a measure of quality in there, then no - they are not doing the same work. Honestly if we had kick ass bots that were doing a better job of evaluating 'good' content than humans, I don't think we would be having a lot of these discussions.

There is a big question for a bot designer though - are you going to design a bot that votes for content that raises the value of STEEM, or are you going to write one that maximizes your personal profits. Are they one and the same? If not, does that point to there being a problem?

Curation rewards mostly do not benefit new users and other small stakeholders

The fact that the small stakeholders aren't earning from them is not really an argument against curation rewards in of itself. It comes up in the context of arguing that curation rewards are paying people to curate. The reality is that most of the users that are actively curating are not being paid barely anything at all to do so.

Curation rewards are more of a payment for having a lot of SP than they are for doing the curation work.

This may be true, but we also don’t need to pay people for creating content because many people will do it anyway – and they do.

If you look at the photography example in my post on removing curation rewards, I outlined a pretty basic example about how the monetary incentive for content creation will draw in more users to create content, who will compete for each other to produce the most 'deserving' content. This has an effect of increasing the quality of content, which I think we all agree is probably good for the platform.

The huge difference with curation rewards is that the competition is not actually driven towards curating the best content that will raise the value of STEEM/Steemit. There is a different "end game" in the curation rewards game which arguably produces the wrong incentive as far as what should be voted on.

One of the proposed and debated solutions by users like @clayop and @smooth is to change the algorithm to n log(n). The net result would be to flatten the rewards curve, which would better distribute the overall rewards pool among blog posts and also give smaller stakeholders a larger percentage of curation rewards than is currently received on a given post.

Based on my review so far, I am hugely in favor of this. I believe it solves a different yet related issue to the one that is created by the existence of curation rewards though. My preference would be to make both changes, but making one of them is better than none (IMO).

a focus on quality curating should result in better returns for human curator

I think the real problem to solve if we are going to keep curation rewards is figuring out a way to make them incentivize the type of voting behavior that we want. (That which promotes content that raises the value of STEEM.)

Personally, I am not sure if this is possible to do - but I am open to ideas/proposals that would aim to accomplish this.