I couldn't disagree more about removing curation rewards:
- Every vote provides information, and the collection of all those votes is immensely valuable. The people who create that value should be compensated.*
- One point of author and curation rewards is so that people can "buy into" steem with their time. Some people don't write well or simply prefer not to. For on-boarding, those people should also have a way to gain steem by giving time.
- Curation rewards are the only things that encourage long term demand. Authors suffer no penalty for cashing out immediately.
- As noted here, there is a many-to-one relationship of curation rewards to posts, so curation rewards are far more efficient at creating blockchain demand and distributing steem than author rewards.
- Competition for curation rewards will encourage bots and people to become better voters than they would without that competition (once the appropriate rewards algorithm is found and implemented)
- Voters make up a larger stakeholder group than authors. It is a bad for the platform to intentionally disincentivize our largest group of stakeholders.
*w.r.t. point 1, see The Myth of AI, A Conversation with Jaron Lanier
This pattern—of AI only working when there's what we call big data, but then using big data in order to not pay large numbers of people who are contributing—is a rising trend in our civilization, which is totally non-sustainable. Big data systems are useful. There should be more and more of them. If that's going to mean more and more people not being paid for their actual contributions, then we have a problem.