There's a whole literature now on addictive design and positive reinforcements in tech UI/UX. It's weird that no front end has made systematic use of it to 1. Retain users better. And 2. Increase time people want to spend on their website (which now equals more ad revenue), and 3. Makes more people want to buy or power up SP to participate in what is a very rewarding experience as you say.
Imo, solving the problem most other social medias have where most users find the time they spend on it "wasteful", and instead providing an experience of time-well-spent and actually rewarding, is how we can attract the masses. Not niche ideas of censorship resistance and fancy decentralized consensus rules (which are of course still very important and enabling. But they are in the background and enabling).
Anyways, really cool to see you curate! Keep it up.
I totally agree with that. A slick and nice front-end for Steem could do wonders. IMHO introducing a front-end which makes curation fun would have been a much easier (and more straight-forward) way of getting people to curate than changing the economic incentive.