I happen to strongly disagree. I note rewarding curation so as to potentiate focusing on profitability actually inhibits curation that focuses on quality of content. While I don't have a specific and demonstrable proposal to put forward, I note the gamification of curation has created the extant trending page, which I am confident no one finds optimal.
Curation rewards may not need to be reduced, but it may also be that curation would be improved were curation rewards eliminated altogether. I do hope that communities and SMTs will soon enable testing of various parameters so as to generate data and support improving curation to limit the impact of mere profiteering on content generation. There are various essential social values that aren't adequately superable via the extant curation mechanism, and we need more data before we can determine what precisely those are, and how best to effect them.
Further, values aren't ubiquitous, and no one shares the exact suite of values weighted identically with anyone. Given how curating content effects societal values, I am sure a spectrum of curative mechanisms will eventually prove optimal. Society is far more, and more valuable, than finance and economic factors alone.
Edit: there are accounts on the blockchain that neither post nor comment, but do curate. Limiting support mechanisms to author rewards alone gives such accounts a free ride. Since such accounts likely have very little support from the community anyway, taxing the rest of the community going forward greatly increases the relative power such accounts will have in the future.
Also, some accounts don't upvote at all, and the entirety of their impact on the blockchain is flagging. I am presently struggling to properly qualify the impact such accounts will have on the kinds of proposals we are considering in these comments, but, unless the inflationary impact of such accounts contribute to such proposals as we eventually adopt, we will financially reward accounts whose only purpose is to effect censorship.
I certainly don't want that, and don't think anyone does.
It comes down to providing the right balance of incentives. At the moment passive income (vote selling, delegating to bots) is higher than contributing to the platform through curation. It is roughly three times higher. Adjusting curation rewards up to somewhere closer to passive income will provide incentive for users to be active. 50/50 split between authors and curators has been suggested. I am not convinced that will be sufficient to pull delegation from bots. I think 75% curation will be effective if combined with several other changes such as separate downvote pool and SBD included in payout to curators. Someone mentioned 100% curation rewards but I believe that would kill the incentive to create content.
A much higher curation reward will most likely increase the incentive to frontrun bots, thus reducing bot curation rewards. Frontrunners could be earning well over 100% of rewards per vote, which will be higher than any bot could offer. If bots are only getting 2/3 of the curation rewards and offering a positive ROI, they could be earning less than the 75% curation reward. The incentives to operate and delegate to bots will be greatly reduced.
Downvotes would be more effective as well as the downvote will reduce rewards to the curator. Curators are more likely to upvote content they feel will not be downvoted. This is another reason why downvotes should not penalise the downvoter. At the moment downvoting is close to non-existent. If downvotes were free, i.e. separate downvote pool, people would be more likely to use them.
Thanks for your comment. It is good to see another perspective on the matter. I think this response covers your other comment as well.