In order to earn anything significant from them, you first have to invest a large amount of SP.
The idea isn't to "earn anything significant." The idea is to earn anything at all. This is one of the most common misconceptions about this platform - that everyone should be earning a bunch of money for doing menial tasks with little investment. As far as I can recall, that's not what STEEM/Steemit is all about. It's supposed to be a way for people to earn a little bit of cryptocurrency for doing what they would normally do on other social media sites. This isn't supposed to replace everyone's full-time job.
So, with that in mind, if you're earning a few SP every week by simply upvoting posts when you read them, then you're doing much better than you normally would on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or pretty much any other platform in existence, where you earn precisely nothing for doing the same thing. What can we call "significant" earnings in relation to that? Maybe five SP per week? Ten SP? Fifty?
I think we tend to lose sight of what this place really is and that probably has to do with how posts were being paid out in the first couple of months. Not everyone is going to earn thousands of dollars per post, or hundreds of dollars per post...or even tens of dollars per post. But, if you're earning something from posting and curating, then you're doing great compared to the major social platforms that are most widely used.
(IMO) They encourage a different form of voting which does not promote user engagement.
Curation alone isn't going to promote user engagement. You get engagement from an active user base and engaging content. We don't have the former and the latter is quite scarce around here - and mostly due to the tiny user base.
@snowflake I disagree with you that "Steemit is about rewarding content creators". If you read the white paper, rewards are supposed to be for all valuable contributions, not just "content". The former includes voting.
I agree with @ats-david that the curation rewards should be increased and, if they were, a lot more users (not just bloggers) would be getting significant rewards on a regular basis and would be more enthusiastic about the system and in turn telling more of their friends (also not just bloggers) why they should sign up. The cut from the original design has not just been by 50% but more like 75%, and this has had a devastating impact not only on the incentives to buy SP but also the incentives for non-bloggers to join and participate at all.
The other changes I would make to curation rewards are to make them less top heavy (by generally making rewards less top heavy) and to make them less front-loaded meaning reduce the share that is earned by the first votes. All voters should get a share (early voters can still get a bit more). Both changes would reduce a lot of the current incentives to run curation bots. If early voters on the best (by far) paying posts didn't get such an enormous share of curation rewards, more of the curation rewards would go to ordinary voters.
That is one goal. It is not the "primary" or only goal. Curation is indeed an important factor and we know that the original split in rewards was 50/50 for content and curating. Voting incentives are just as important to the goals of STEEM/Steemit as content creation are.
But as I said - the market for content consumption is exponentially larger than that for creators. The user base can expand much more and much more rapidly by incentivizing readers and voters just as much or more so than content creators.
Based on what data? If you have no incentives for readers and voters, why would they care to buy in, power up, and spend time curating? How many people do you think will pay to use social media, which is free on many more user-friendly and wildly more popular sites and apps?
Not everyone is a blogger. And if you have only a community of bloggers, it will likely be small and the bloggers will likely spend more time on creating than they will on curating.
You make some really good points, and I agree with pretty much all of them. With that said, I still think that the actual way curation rewards play out in practice is not good for the long-term growth of the platform.
And from more rewards for comments (which is coming)
Steemit is about rewarding content creators, that's the primary goal of steemit. More content creators will earn rewards with a proposal like this, it is totally aligned with steemit's objectives.
That is currently impossible to do on steemit !!!
Why? Because UX is ages behind FB (or othe platforms) for example...
Maybe eventually that is the major problem we have... It's difficult for the average Joe to feel comfortable like on other social media platforms!
PS And in my humble opinion that is why bitshares exchange is still not successful . Very bad UX compared with centralized exchanges!