The rewards for reading are split among potentially hundreds or thousands of voters.
I do agree that a 50/50 split would make the curation 'game' more appealing, and would provide additional incentive for users to power up. My issue with it is this though:
Even though the curation reward is being split amongst hundreds of thousands of voters, it is really the big whales who are getting 99% of the curation rewards. Even a good dolphin curator with 5-10k worth of SP who maximizes their curation by somehow voting on posts that all get upvoted by whales, will only see a very tiny portion of the curation rewards from the posts.
The "little guy" curator will still not have much incentive to power up, because even with increased curation rewards - their portion is so minuscule that it won't really matter. It seems like in the end it will help the rich get/stay richer, but offer very little to average users who can not afford to buy in 100k worth of SP.
This problem is solved by redistribution (i.e. whale selling). As long as <1% of the users own 95% of the SP (source: https://steemd.com/distribution), everything else will follow along in this same (broken) proportions.
Spread the stake, then the system can work really well, not before.
As I said elsewhere, linear changes in curation (specifically cutting it in half or doubling it) do not in any way change the proportions that are going to various demographic segments. Cutting whales' curation in half does not help anything if it also cuts non-whales curation in half (or worse, pushes non-whales below the minimum floor where they go no curation rewards whatsoever), and that is what was done.
And finally, what is happening by piling on even more content rewards? A few very successful bloggers are concentrating the bulk of the rewards, amassing huge portions of stake, becoming the next whales, and still not helping the little guy (btw, many of them are using automated voting now). This is not really solving the problem either.
Nevertheless, despite this ongoing issue, even in this thread I see non-whales discussing curation and their strategies for performing it as a compelling form of engagement.
@smooth True! Infact little dolphins can make significant SP/month; easily compare infovore and charlieshrem (very new btw) with equivalent SP and followers but significant differences in curation return.
I also manually curate 6.7 SP/week & from where I am from that pays my coffee all week )).
I totally agree.
What level do you currently need to be at though in order to make any serious money from curation rewards though? 50k? Does cutting that from 50k to 25k really provide much more incentive to power up? Regardless of whether the split it is 75/25 or 50/50, I think the threshold of SP needed to really make a difference is so high, that nobody other than a huge investor is going to see this change as an attraction to power up.
I don't completely agree. While most of the rewards are going to a handful of contributors, there are still a significant number of small users who are getting a lot of SP from posting. I think way more users are gaining SP from authoring than from curating. With a 50/50 split, less money would be going to low SP holders through posting, and more would go to high SP holders who get the bulk of the curation rewards.