This is an interesting development! A few minutes before your article I'd just posted an article wondering whether it was worth creating content.
It takes time to write, stream of consciousness pieces will take up to an hour and researched pieces can take up to four hours, and it's absolutely disheartening when they simply get ignored. I was wondering whether it would be more sensible for a minnow like me to simply give up on content, and log in for ten minutes a day and vote for some interesting stuff and leave it at that.
Minnows don't really benefit from curation rewards. Curation rewards a heavily biased toward whales.
In other words, if I was a minnow then I wouldn't even think about curation rewards and would focus entirely on posts. Only a whale would care about curation rewards.
This is the part that needs improvement then.
Everyone should get something for contributing\voting\curating, that was part of the pitch and is the half the reason the platform is interesting.
Once new users figure out that a small group of miners\bots are the only ones that give upvotes worth anything and that their voting does nothing they will quickly tire of seeing $0.00 everywhere. Put some effort into rewarding the "minnows" if you want them to stay and participate.
I guess I'm pro bot. I think eventually bots will be content producers and curators and this will be a good thing if the quality of content production and curation improves. If quality improves then let the bots keep the profit. At the same time there will be opportunities for humans to do stuff bots can't do in the future because bots can't do everything well.
Bots will never be quality content producers. If the wordpress copy\autoreword bots do come here, it will just drive people away. Those things produce nothing of value, just spam badly constructed garbage.
I hate to suggest it, but a captcha system to prevent bots from ruining this is looking like a necessity.
Only in the current system - designed and done to your liking. When you dump 90% of the Curation power to those that have proven to be the "great curators" by 'being able to read your code and mine your tokens in 1 week or less"
There is a need to revise how curation is pitched. It's ironic because I started composing a piece on yesterday on the entitled - "Jokes Aside - Don't sell Steem Power as being money."We basically need to attract people that see curating as a fun, alturistic venture rather than a means of making a living.
So a waste of time either way and better to stick content on a site monetised with advertising? :-)
If the content could earn anything meaningful from advertising and didn't get upvotes I would be surprised.