I understand your argument. Most of this world has been forged via competition and survival of the fittest. Sometimes strategies that seem not intuitive actually work. I.e. a male lion killing all other male lions that are not his kids. It seems it destroys part of its own species, but what it actually does improve the quality of DNA pool overall.
If we wanted to create the best curators than this skill game strategy is the perfect way to do it and it would also not matter if it were human or a bot.
However is our goal not to build something that many people like. So including many people is important and then making them pick winners vs picking the best people pick the winner.
Is the goal to pick the best content or is the goal to have many people decide what good content is?
Maybe I mis-understand the objective.
Thank you for the dialog and sharing your thoughts. I am certainly learning from it.
It is both. You have SP. SP has the ability to vote. You can decide how you want to use your SP: Do you you want to play the competitive curation-for-rewards game, or just be a late voter and vote for what you like? Voting for what you like is exactly how you express your preferences to the earlier voters (i.e. professional, competitive curators, human and/or bot). The earlier voters are rewarded when later voters (who are basically unrewarded) support their picks. But how are the later voters rewarded?
In return for rewarding the earlier voters, the later voters get this: Those earlier voters will in the future to the maximum extent possible, deliver to you exactly what you want, curated from as many sources as possible, as quickly as possible in much the same was as Google tries to deliver to you the search results you want or Facebook delivers to you the feed contents you want, except of course in those two cases or others like them, there is no transparency nor are they necessarily choosing based on your preferences (as opposed to theirs). They will do this because whichever early curator gets the most later votes will get the biggest rewards.
Right now, competition is low, so it makes some sense for you to compete even if not doing a very good job. In the future, competition will be much tougher. By not reading the posts and voting on any somewhat-viable-looking crap anyway, you might earn 0.001 or not even that (in fact smart competitive curators might even try to actively sabotage you with decoy posts). It won't be worth it and you will decide you might as well just vote what you like and be rewarded with the services of the really good curators.
I don't think it is necessarily quite this simple because portions of the market may mature (become highly competitive) at different rates and to different degrees. People will also have different competitive advantages. If there are Urdu posts, I'll probably not do a very good job of curating them, but native Urdo speakers might be good at it. That market might be too small for high powered bots (and bot-human collaborations) to make sense for a longer period of time, and thus remain more open to casual curators-for-reward much longer than the larger English market. Likewise for various other niches.
Does this make sense?