Nah, even under linear rewards there have been mid-$100s in rewards on some content, and definitely a lot of content regularly earning $10s.
He was writing about thousands of dollars per post ...
Of course rewards were higher than now, also with a linear rewards curve, but not as high as at the very beginning of STEEM(it).
Yes you're right, the very tip top obviously makes more under n^2 (which was even tens of thousands in a few cases). I guess I was responding to his broader point of it being possible for authors to make a lot more than now under a more functional system, and I do absolutely believe that to be the case.
So you think that EIP will lead to a more functional system?
Actually, if I had to choose, altogether I wouldn't be against EIP. That's how I see it:
I am in favour of the convergent rewards curve.
Concerning the 'downvote pool' I see the benefits that spam, plagiarism and bit bot supported trendig posts could be downvoted more effectively.
On the other hand it would allow (and make it profitable for) whales even more easily to follow and downvote every single posts of people they just don't like ... unfortunately this happens here and makes a devastating impression on new (or potentially new) users who are observing these 'flag wars'.
As I described in My STEEM Vision. for example a committee of respected users elected by the community and equipped with sufficient delegated STEEM power could be called in such cases and then decide whether the flags were justified or not.
Users who aren't ever affected by these kind of flaggs out of personal reasons really underestimate their bad effect on STEEM in my opinion.
I think apart from whales ('good' and 'bad' ones) most users wouldn't flag more than before anyway, due to fear of retaliation.
Maybe some would even create alt accounts just to downvote them without risk to get the curation rewards (Steemians are so creative). :)
Concerning the 50 % curation rewards I am not against trying it, but I am not so convinced of the positive effects. I understand the idea to make it more attractive for whales to upvote again ... but at the same time I wonder why these big accounts are that fixated on their ROI? If the STEEM price raises significantly again, they will be unbelievable rich anyway, if it doesn't, the ROI also doesn't matter much: they have lost money anyway. I personally would agree not to earn one single more STEEM if that would guarantee a significantly higher STEEM price. Better concentrate on making the cake bigger than on getting a bigger part of a cake which is getting smaller and smaller.
I curate manually and anyway already now (with 75/25) I upvote posts which I like and don't care much about the curation rewards (most of the time I upvote late and don't care who else upvoted these posts). That wouldn't change at all with '50/50': I still would upvote what I like.
I like to upvote new/unknown users manually. Often my upvote is the only 'big' upvote under their articles. At least I can support them. With 50 % curation rewards I couldn't support these users as effectively as now because anyway I would get a big part of my own upvote back.
I think many manual middle sized curators do the same. They curate because they just like the curated posts.
Yes, with more curation rewards whales would maybe join automated curation trails instead of using bid bots (that would be a progress). However, I am not really a fan of these automated curation trails. They select a few lucky users which start earning quite some money on every post (the posts are not evaluated manually) but the big majority of users still doesn't earn anything. I would prefer that as many users as possible earned small amounts of money instead of a few selected ones earning quite much. That would be only possible if more (bigger) users were making the effort to curate manually and really read/watch content before upvoting.
And yes, I think the number of satisfied 'normal' users ("authors") does matter. I described it like this:
"A rich pool of satisfied users would also make STEEM much more interesting for larger investors in the long run than it still is today, interesting to place advertisements read by many, to market products, to disseminate information. The value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users."
Even if I don't like it, Facebook is a successful example ...
I think it is very possible and a credible sincere effort that is worth a try. I don't think it is guaranteed to work, but little ever is.