Many whales like Steem for what they consider passive income. Hopefully instead of delegating to bid bots for that income, they will delegate to curation services which, in theory, could mean better content discovery which (again, in theory) means higher quality content will be rewarded which might encourage other quality authors to post and get discovered.
As for small voting power, they essentially have little influence no matter what rewards method is used. That’s by design. If people find value here, they will power up to participate. If not, they won’t.
I'm actually working on a project that could solve that problem. The idea is to turn multisig accounts into DAOs. Really, any community could create a multisig account as a Decentralized Curation Community (DCC).
You can check out the post here: https://steemit.com/palnet/@hobo.media/hobodao-announcement-and-what-s-a-dcc
This looks really interesting! Thank so for sharing. I’d like to know more.
I would be happy to take some time and answer any questions you have about the project. Right now we are looking for people that are active on Steem and reliable to fill one of three roles. We have many spots in these three groups for the HoboDAO.
Let me know if I can chat with you in some form that you like such as discord or email and answer any questions you might have about this project.