Isn't it better to incentivize people for spending more and more time on the platform, looking over more and more content?
It is, up to a point. But the guy who is upvoting 800 things a day isnt doing that.
In a sense, the voting target threshold is an attempt to do exactly as you say -- ensure that the user is spending a certain amount of time reading before upvoting.
To do it directly, the way you propose, would be difficult i think, because it would have to be done on the blockchain level, not on the UI. But even then there would be an effective limit on the number of votes.
So for example, lets say the target reading time in minutes is 30 minutes to cast a max strength vote.
That means I can cast precisely 48 100% votes per day (or 90 50% votes or 180 25% votes)
That is to say, it works exactly like voting strength does now.
In terms of votes per day it's about the same. The big difference is that I can't do all 48 of those votes in the span of two minutes and have the chance to get full rewards - you see? People don't have to read the content in order to up-vote. They are in no way punished for voting on content that they don't actually look at.
If you're willing to up-vote something then you should desire to look at it/ read it, no? But that's not necessarily the case, here on Steemit. People are up-voting content on auto-pilot, trying to get high curation rewards off of popular content/ authors.
With my "vote with your time" suggestion, such people are penalized for voting on content that they actually don't like. In order to give a "full-strength" vote for a post, you'd have to spend X time (let's stick with the 30 minutes for sake of consistency), which means that you'd now have to spend 30 minutes on a post that doesn't really interest you - you're penalized because time is valuable and no one likes wasting 30 minutes, especially for minimal payouts.
If it could somehow be coded into the block-chain such that you only get paid for reading one post at a time, even if you have like 40 posts up on different tabs within the i-browser, making it clear to the user on the UI which post he/she is voting towards (perhaps with an option built-in to change which post the "voting time" goes towards), I'm almost certain that voting patterns would change in a big and positive way.
I think we'd start to see more community members focusing their time (votes) towards content that they actually like, versus those that they perceive as popular...but I could be wrong. I'm just basing it on my time is valuable hypothesis.
The time-vote pay system could work maybe but would be hard to do.
People might also open up multiple browsers to let them wait 30 minutes.
Bots might wait 30 minutes to get the curation.
Yeah, there are definitely some ways to game it, but, I think it's the most resource demanding of all the other alternatives.
I mean, vote in a matter of seconds or be forced to wait out 5 to 10 minutes, the latter definitely requires more "patience".
What I was really after though is getting a more accurate representation of what people actually like. Most people don't want to waste their time sitting on pages that bore them, they're naturally drawn to the blogs that interest them.