Because upvotes are monetized for the one voting, there is an underlying fear of not maximizing your investment. Your voting power sits at 100% while you sleep or are indisposed, preventing you from making the most of your stake.
I've thought of a couple remedies:
Upvotes are worth nothing for the one voting, and only support the content creator. I think voting would occur more naturally, and people would be less fearful of "squandering" votes or not getting in enough. I know though that breaks down the whole concept of curation, that those with the most stake have the most input on content that benefits the community.
I wonder if dynamically adjusted voting could help. Let people vote as much as they want, and then distribute their daily curation allotment proportionally to all upvotes. (This would only work though if you couldn't self-vote, as many would take advantage of this feature.) This would also fix people fearful of "wasting" votes or trying to get in a certain number each day.
In the meantime, I use auto-voting - but only for individuals and communities I believe in. I support @curie and @minnowsupport. I'm also part of a group that just started - @steemdeepthink - and we use autovoting to support content writers.
I feel it isn't ideal, but until Steemit starts making more frequent functional updates, the community is really just left on their own to make something work.
Yup, removing curation rewards has been tossed around before, but not gained traction yet. It would curb autovoting a decent amount.
What is your ideal?
My ideal is that people would upvote what they like without concern for the financial side. This would get rid of the mentality of trying to pick a "winning horse" before anyone else does. Original posts and comments receive payouts proportional to the number of votes, and still proportional to the size of the account. People will still give value representative of their investment in the site overall, but original posters would receive 100% of the profits, instead of the 75%/25% split.
Incentivizing curation may have been necessary in Steemit's infancy, but we have over 45,000 weekly active users now. (According to @penguinpablo - "Weekly Steem Stats Report - July 31, 2017"). We may not have the numbers of Facebook or Reddit, but we definitely have interest. I don't think people need as much financial incentive to curate - it will happen regardless.
I think it's exactly the opposite which is true. Now more than ever people should be incentivized to curate. It will be harder and harder, as the number of users and posts grow, to actually find good quality content.
Now, how the curation process is done, that's a completely different thing.