Manual curation works on other platforms. YouTube is a great example where people actively curate content. There are many videos with thousands even millions of likes. These likes help gain exposure for the creator as well as helps them earn ad revenue (eyes on content). YouTube does not pay people to like content. People click 'like' because they like the content. They click 'dislike' because they dislike the content.

So imagine how successful manual curation would be if people were paid to upvote the content they liked. We were close to that at the beginning. Now we need to pay (opportunity cost of using SP to curate content instead of sell votes) to curate content instead of be paid. If YouTube charged users to pay to 'like' videos, most people would not click 'like'. After all, they can still enjoy the content for free.

This takes me back to increasing curation rewards. Higher curation rewards will reduce the cost of curating to stakeholders and even make it profitable if done right. This also enables delegation to people who want to spend time curating content. These curators will earn from curating content. The Steem ecosystem will start to function again. Investors will see a return on their investment in terms of a price rise.

To facilitate delegating to curators, we should have delegation contracts specifying the terms of delegation and beneficiary rewards to delegators. I believe this should sway a sufficient number of investors to remove delegation from bots and support curators. Many believe 50% curation rewards will be sufficient, I have a little less faith in human nature and believe 75% will work. As it stands, there is general witness consensus for 50% as well as a downvote pool, which I think will help.

See post from @cervantes below.

‘Witness consensus status to fix the actual steem’s economic flows (ENG)’

This post was 4 months ago, so I am becoming a little impatient. I am also wondering why witnesses are not joining the discussions in this post. Might be time to give them a wake up call soon.

Edit: Another option is to remove or suspend the rewards pool. Inflation could be reduced to 4%, 20% to witnesses, 20% to Steem.DAO and 60% as interest. I personally do not like this idea but at the moment the rewards is not adding sufficient value to cover the supply of Steem/ inflation that it costs. This will at least give the best content creators a chance to gain exposure. Vote selling and self-voting will no longer offer financial gain.