If you want Steemit to grow, you need to attract people who will actually read, vote on, and share the content. So, rather than eliminate curation rewards, they should be increased - at least back to the 50% reward that they initially were.
You got it backwards, curation rewards reduces the number of readers and voters.
Based on what data that can corroborate this claim?
More users with influence means more readers. Also look at the comment section, barely anyone is voting.
Can you elaborate on this?
Sure. There are lots of reasons for that. One of them is that it doesn't pay much to vote on comments. There's not enough incentive for many users.
More influence, means more inclusion, more involvement, more activity and ultimately more reading. If curation rewards are removed everyone will vote manually which will lead to a lot more reading too.
[nesting]
@ats-david
You have two things you can vote on:
You also have a finite amount of votes to maximize your total curation rewards. This leads people to vote primarily on Posts, so they earn more rewards.
If you were to eliminate curation rewards, then there's no difference in voting on a post or a comment, which would lead to an increase in votes on comments, which would lead to more comments...
That's my train of logic, not sure if it's solid or not yet, but that's where I'm at :)