100% @blocktrades. I’ve said multiple times that I’m just playing devils advocate, but I tend to lean towards a greater split going to curators because it will incentivize more outward voting.

I think a lot of people are confused and believe that you need a huge stake to earn high curation rewards... it’s actually the opposite that is true: when you have a smaller stake, it’s actually easier to earn a higher “multiple” on your curation reward when you vote before others on a post.

For example, under the current structure if you vote first with $0.10 on a post and then $1.50 worth of votes come in after yours, then your curation reward is $0.10 (equivalent to a self vote)...

However, let’s say a whale with a $100 vote does the same thing and is first on a post: it would take $1500 worth of votes after their $100 to make their vote equivalent to a 100% self vote.

And that’s under the current structure. If curation rewards were to tilt more in favor of curators (or at least, 50/50), then it would become significantly easier for a curator to earn more by curating new and high quality posts that people actually like - regardless of how big your stake is (and actually as I demonstrated, it favors those with a smaller stake).

The original goal of the entire Steem system is to reward outward behavior and in exchange, know that if you produce great content others will also be participating in such outward voting habits and upvote your content as much or likely even more than you upvote their content because it is in everyone’s best economic interest to curate good content.

Obviously, the system isn’t working as intended. I’m not sure if increase curation rewards would solve all the issues, but it could be worth a try. Additionally, I think SMTs are going to change the “tribalism” of Steem and make scalable what is currently unscalable (I.e. better economic incentives for good behavior, better disincentives for bad behavior, content discovery, etc).