Very true, with the reward limit at seven days it encourages a different mentality when posting, and with the voting changes it seems that it's profitable for large investors to just sit back and collect automatically. Without any manual curation of content that will draw larger audiences who seek content itself and not just upvotes, or way to parse content for longevity and for it to be rewarded, I don't see how the platform can reach a critical mass sized userbase when other platforms reward that kind of content better in terms of eyeballs and effect on society. We're still under 70,000 daily users and a million pageviews, some subforums on other sites easily beat that out.
I think that when we seek short-term profits as producers of content or curators it's as if we are just planting fast-growing trees and fertilizing them in an industrial, mass-produced way that will give the largest yield of lumbar possible. With the commodification of content as a vehicle for profit-making there is no incentive for excellence, growth or regeneration of the seeds we sow, because even though older posts aren't literally ripped from the ground they still might as well be ghosts that no one chooses to interact with.
If we were to endorse a separate human-verified (captcha or something similar?) vote that replenishes, say, once a day, let's call it a cultivator vote, we could consider posts that were planted more as fruit trees that bear knowledge or enrich the community and its viewers past the seven-day period for a vote that would extend the tail for profit-making and viewership. Display them in a fifth column, cultivated, where they can be seen for posterity's sake and continue to draw attention to important issues that deserve a longer shelf-life, and encourage new users who would feel that their once a day cultivator vote has an immediate impact, even if their small allotment of ten votes a day doesn't have an immediate effect until their account gets established.