Curation rewards incentivize the mindless bot behavior and it's the mindless bots that are being given as the reason for the whale war.

Ditch it and give people an interest rate for holding SP equivalent to what they would have gained from curation. It's simpler and it serves a valid purpose.

Curation will still occur because of solidarity. People like who they like and we upvote our friends even when they shitpost :D

VIVA was designed partly based on lessons learned from steem, so the comparison is a good one.

Under VIVA your ability to upvote tomorrow is partially related to whether or not you used your upvotes the previous day. The longer you sit idle and do nothing, the lower your power creeps. It's the opposite of steem in that regard. That's why it's called "participatory income". You get paid more for what you do, than what you did. But you continue to benefit from all your efforts, for life.

Steem could mimick this in a way by ditching curation rewards and causing all new funds regardless of source to be autopowered up, instead of entering general circulation. Then when people want money they could just start powering down. The incentive there is the price of steem will have risen dramatically because it pinches hard on the supply.