Even altruistic voting gives curation rewards especially if it ends up trending. That was the original design right? It encouraged people to add value which brings more and more value to the platform.
Well yes, but the original design was for curation rewards to be 50%, and they also did not have the penalty for the first 30-, 15- or soon to be 5-minutes. The changes that were made later, largely impulsively and without good rationale, undermined a lot of that balance to the point that curation rewards became almost meaningless, and the incentives to just sell votes became overwhelmingly strong.
The hope is that HF21 is going to re-balance those incentives somewhat back toward what you describe, where altruistic or at least non-agnostic voting isn't so heavily penalized relative to vote selling. We'll see how it works out but it's certainly a step toward what you describe.
Oh really, I didn't even realize it was originally 50/50. I hit 3 years here the other day and as far as I'm aware it's always been 75/25 during that time. I could be wrong about that as I'm just going off of memory.
I do think HF21 is a step in the right direction towards rebalancing those incentives. I'll be paying close attention to see the effects. I like the idea of incentivizing that altruistic behavior and I might even prefer that to instilling it as a culture, but I'm open to both routes to moving away from vote selling completely.
The change from 50/50 was made in mid 2016 so it is quite possible you weren't around for it.