I go make 100 accounts that all are minnows. I slowly start writing posts with them. On each of these posts, I use a whale account to upvote, and collect 75% of the rewards from the post.
Once the accounts gain enough SP from rewards, I power them down and discard them, making new accounts to harvest 75% rewards off of.
It would be a new way for people to farm curation rewards at a much higher rate than we see right now.
So what stops you from doing the same at the current 25% rate?
Nothing - it's just that by increasing it from 25% to something higher, it becomes more of a problem.
I'm not saying the problem doesn't exist currently, but this compounds it and makes it worse :)
It's not a problem to use reputation into the equation - that way exploiting new accounts will be considerably harder.
Using reputation allows someone with a higher reputation to upvote someone with a lower one and do the same thing.
Not impossible, harder yes. Will people do it. Absolutely, if the rewards are large enough and the time it takes to do so is negligible in comparison.