Okay. First off, thank you for this. You answered the question I had regarding where the auto self-upvoting rewards actually go after HF 20 if they're no longer going to the author. They end up back in the rewards pool, rather than with the curators.
Which seems like a wasted opportunity, since so many people who self-upvote claim to be doing it to sweeten the curator pot when they've actually been sweetening their own author's pot with the self-upvote. It seems like the curator rewards would be significantly impacted if the auto self-upvoting actually folded into the curator rewards.
So, the status quo is more or less maintained. I guess we might as well keep HF 19 (aside from Velocity, maybe).
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You were talking about a potential 1-2.5% increase in curator rewards between HF 19 and HF20 depending on when everyone voted. I was thinking that if that 6.6% that might go back to the rewards pool in your example actually ended up with the curators, it would be better to get the 25% distributed among them than just the 18-20%. Sweetening the pot might not be the right phrase, but potentially having the entire 25% to work with rather than only 18-something percent would be better than nothing.
As it is, I'm not sure why a 65-35, or 60-40 split hasn't been proposed, discussed, implemented, what have you. I understand the 50-50 split that was tried went away, not sure why, but guessing author's didn't like sharing so much with the curators. Which is fine. I would hope that the author is putting in more time to create a post than a curator is spending to read the post and then decide whether or not to upvote it. Or for that matter, simply auto voting, so I'm in agreement that the majority of the rewards should go with the author. There's still a range between 75-25 and 50-50 that could be explored, but as you say, that's a whole different topic.
So, this begs the question, "Why?"