Wouldn't a simple captcha get rid of the bots?
I don't think the point is to get rid of bots.
Now we end up in a situation where curators only receives 3% of the post's payout, that means people are disincentivize to participate in the system and to buy steem power.
Manual curators can earn 20% annual returns on their SP; automated curators can earn over 50%. Those are decently large numbers.
You know what? Im not even sure it does. Because popular content always gets a lot of money, 3% of $200 ( which is $6) is still better than 40% of $10 ( which is $4).
True. But $6 is a lot less than the $50 it would be otherwise. It all comes down to a philosophy of what curation rewards should do. The devs feel that curation rewards should favor exploration, and I tend to agree. Ask yourself this: why should people who vote for @charlieshrem get anything? Everybody knows that his posts are going to be popular, so it's a waste of money to pay people to "find his posts."
But that's just one philosophy, and the reason I adhere to it.
What do you think about authors deciding how much they want to give to curators?
I've always thought that was a good idea: https://steemit.com/steem/@biophil/proposal-let-content-creators-commit-a-portion-of-their-authorship-reward-to-curators
The problem is that decreasing rewards on popular post doesn't achieve the intended effect, people still upvote these posts and these post are still getting the bulk of the money. So now we end up with an even bigger problem which is that curation rewards are extremely low on the platform.
If devs want to favor exploration , letting authors decide how much they give to curators is the best way to do it imo.
It's true. I've always been disappointed that the website gives absolutely no feedback to voters about how curation rewards work, so incentives only do something for people with the time and expertise to dig into the source code.