Regarding the use of curation rewards to combat comment spam:
@mattclarke has recommended a "rollback" to an even balance between author and curation rewards. I think the idea is brilliant.
I believe there is another benefit to be had from increasing curation rewards. I'm looking at this from the perspective of content creator.
One of the motives that drives me to produce quality content is the hope of actually being read and appreciated by a wide range of readers. Not only is it disappointing to spend hours or days writing a thoughtful article only to have it earn a pittance in author rewards, it is also disheartening to look at the "eyeball" indicator and find that only a dozen people have even bothered to open and read it.
There is an old adage that I think could be applied to Steemit as we know it today: "Too many cooks spoil the soup."
If curation rewards were elevated, the Steemit population would naturally spend more time reading and evaluating authors than they would re-posting or writing trivia. Their engagement in commenting and curating would be more rewarding than merely "tossing off" articles in mass quantity. They would be more likely to search for and bring to the forefront authors of excellence.
At the very least, motivation to actually read and think about articles would naturally increase. As an author, I want that.
And so I certainly support returning to "50/50" and perhaps even beyond that to test rewarding curation over authorship.
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While the thought behind it sounds really good, I strongly believe it would not play out in practice . Curation rewards only benefit users who already have enough SP to earn rewards. For the vast majority of users, whether it is 25% or 50%, they will still not earn enough to make actually curating worth it.
Thanks, @timcliff, for the thoughtful response.
I must confess that I lack detailed knowledge of exactly how the payout algorithms function. And so I'll retreat to commenting that I think any adjustment that would improve the rewards balance in the direction of curation would be beneficial to Steemit. If that means somehow adjusting what constitutes "enough SP to earn curation rewards" to make that an accessible threshold for anyone, maybe that should be on the table.
I think it would be a huge draw for people who would realize that the "wisdom of the crowd" represented in part by their opinion could translate into financial rewards.
Simultaneously, it would encourage creators of excellent content to continue to produce worthy material because they would have an ever-growing readership.
I would love to hear some proposals to achieve this. I agree, this would be a huge plus!