I'll reply with a radically different idea. Not that I would really want something like this implemented, but I think it addresses some issues in a more effective way.
People look for profit. Thus, you need to create systems that incentivize particular behaviors. The current incentivized behavior in terms of curation is to vote early on popular authors / whales. We can all agree that curation should focus more on the content rather than the status of the author.
So, you need to discourage this behavior in order to achieve more desirable behavior. So, instead of giving curations rewards to all voters, let's give it to only one voter. We pick the winner randomly but give the earlier voters higher odds in the curation lottery (although we would punish those who vote too early (random 5-10 minute penalty)). The winner wins all of the curation rewards. The author would be ineligible for the curation lottery.
What does this achieve?
Curators now compete for curation rewards. Thus, big voters will be encouraged to find smaller writers in order to lessen competition. They can still vote for their friends, but the minnows are going to compete for those curation rewards on these bigger authors too, so they probably aren't winning.
Steem Power is now more decentralized and distributed more fairly. Minnows can now become effective curators and can actually get a tangible reward given that they vote enough.
Quality authors are discovered more quickly as there is an incentive to find unknown authors. Why? In order to get curation rewards with minimal competition. Vote stacking simply isn't profitable anymore except to minnows.
Now we don't have to fully commit to such a proposal. We could split rewards 75-12.5-12.5 where 12.5 is curation using the current system and 12.5 is shifted to the curation lottery. But if we remove the guarantee of rewards from curation and encourage curators to find content that has better odds that is still worthy of an upvote than we find a win-win situation.
Also the minnows and new users will stop complaining about being able to earn money. Wouldn't that be nice too? But perhaps this proposal is too radical. It makes centralization of power much harder, and the whales wouldn't like that.
There's at least one missing factor in your idea and that's what is the impact of the voting power used by the curator on his chances to win, so this would need to be worked out, but I guess there's some obvious ways to do that (although they might make the whole idea less appealing).
Also, I'm not sure that vote stacking is really profitable today for curation rewards,but I think most people just aren't aware of that (or just don't care enough about their rather minimal curation rewards enough to modify their behavior).
Your idea is interesting, but it's a bit complicated and should probably be given more consideration after trying some simpler tweaks first. The gamification effect of a winner-take-all system might encourage people to care more about the reward, but only if it didn't always seem to end up in the hands of a whale.
So, I forgot to consider that. In order to achieve the effects of decentralization and avoid spamming the network with small .1% votes, you would probably have to use VP% as another weighting factor when calculating odds.
One could also consider adding the actual voting strength to the calculation, but I worry that this would not be able to achieve the decentralization of rewards given the massive disparity between the votes of minnows and the votes of whales.
The more I think about this, the more I fear it is flawed a concept given that there will always be those who gamify any system as soon as they find a loophole.
The loophole here is that somebody will just create a farm of upvote accounts. And of course, there’s voting trails. Long term a whale will not be interested in discovering the good stuff anymore if they see that their search for quality content written by less popular authors (sorry, there’s so much not popular enough quality content on Steem that the game isn’t all about minnows) is constantly rewarded by zero because of voting trails diluting their possible chance to win. Which seems a core idea in the reasoning behind this idea.
Why wouldn’t a whale just delegate away then? No matter whether for profit or to other curators.
Make it a game, fair play. But don’t overreason it because the more you try to reason things, the more obvious loopholes become. This won’t fix voting guilds/trails, only if the original upvoter gets a higher chance to win. But that’s hard to determine. Not every app can be obliged to open up an API, and any pattern recognition algo may be too resources hungry. Whales will still have their trail because they still open up the highest rewards, so the argument that they will want to find less popular quality content because of less competition is an oxymoron, almost.
Of course, there’s always the option to devaluate the value, and rewards, of automated votes by implementing a dual citizenship structure in which apps must identifying as such,. Failure to do so may result in a whole account (with whole wallet) being frozen, locked, and eventually deactivated.
To be honest, the evolution to such dual citizenship structure is the only way to ever possibly start tackling whichever form of automation is loathed. At the same time it would also introduce an option to completely freeze an account, something which as side effect may become handy a tool for bodies such as steemcleaners. But that also requires rules.
While you're right that lotsa folks making bank curating wouldn't like it, I don't like it for another reason.
Just as it would encourage curation of unknown authors and obscure posts, there's no preference for quality. In fact, it would encourage curating total crap, because the crappiest posts would attract the least curator attention.
That's not the incentive I think we want to create.
Good, original thinking though!
Yeah, I was thinking about this after posting last night. People could create bots that simply seek out posts that have few votes on them. But the rewards are more decentralized.
The biggest issue is that there is no quality discovery mechanism build into Steem that cannot be gamed. Squared rewards were initially intended to reward quality discovery, but were easily gamed.
The biggest dilemma in curation rewards is how does one fool a machine when the task is as simple as clicking on a button at a particular time and place?
The biggest issue is that this continues to be the elephant. But it’s a fallacy because it assumes that everybody wants only quality. If that were the case TMZ, Perez Hilton, daily soaps, shopping channels, and so much mor would never have become popular.
But the reality is that everyone is free to fork an interface and implement their own additional layers. The fact that Steem Inc believes in open source doth not necessarily equate that it is ours to totally play with. Unless of course, we are fine with a lower degree of popularity. Which Steem Inc. Most definitely is and which is one of the reasons why condenser and all other libraries used on steemit.com are open source.
But, please, stop trying to enforce quality as a metric. What to you is quality may be exhausting to somebody else. And that’s a pedestal of elitism one needs to come down from.
Or fork into.
Even poor quality content can find an audience. There’s hundreds, thousands, millions probably, of content/news regurgitating sites online who have enough of an audience to continue operating viably. Quality? Not to me because I prefer HackerNews over PCWorld. But apparently good enough for their audience.