Yes, upvote (we know this because it happens on every other site with no rewards) but no there won't be any real curation. Voting will be done very superficially, likely based on what is already trending, written by well-known authors, written by their friends, or has paid promotion behind it.
No one will invest in combing through dozens and hundreds of crap posts and poor authors to find the few good but unknown ones. If you think it is hard for quality content from independent authors to get noticed and rewarded today, it is nothing compared to a system without curation rewards.
I think this is already happening. Voters seem to just be preempting posts from trendy writers posting in trending topics. And those voters include many whales. Plenty of quality content is already being completely ignored and there's usually not a whale in sight when it happens...because they're still voting the steemit tags and whatever new social media celebrity joins the platform.
If the voting needs to change, the whales need to take the lead on it. I could give you a few posts myself to look at. This could be a valuable platform doing some really great things. But many of the people trying to make it great are essentially being pushed to the point of non-existence because of simply quicker opportunities for money/power grabs. It's unfortunate.