i think that declining rewards is admirable, but misguided

one of the major incentives for users to curate is to earn a reward doing so. declining post payouts removes this incentive.

this is why the number of votes and engagement fell after @engadgetnews made that decision to decline payouts...

if you really just don't want to receive the payouts, its far better for both 1) you and 2) the steem ecosystem for you to enable post payouts, and then just invest the proceeds back into steem by sponsoring cool projects or apps or coding initiatives.

its better for you because your posts will receive more traffic. every steem front-end (like steemit.com) is programmed to place highly upvoted posts in front of users.

its better for steem because your payouts can be used to finance the efforts of open source developers and app developers who make this a deeper ecosystem.

doing this really locks you out of the whole steem process, like i said, i get it. it seems like the admirable thing to do... but its really just unplugging yourself from the steem engine