After reading your other post, with the intense discussion in the comments with @ats-david, I did go to his @ats-witness account and read one of his posts. It was certainly thought provoking and I now see how changing payout to at least 50/50 for curators and authors would not only help encourage the voting, but would also benefit the authors with more likelihood of votes. Ultimately it would also draw people away from investing in the bots if it makes it more lucrative to earn from voting. Currently, if I were to invest in the smartsteem bot you mentioned I'd earn more than double what I currently do curating and I'm not a big SP holder. Without going crazy on self votes, I can't match that.
So with this in mind it made think as I read through this:
people vote on what gets them a return and despite what many believe, it isn't always what maximizes their personal wealth. At least not monetarily.
Very true, but let's be honest the monetary side is the biggest influencer especially when someone can't see a gain in any other way. People donate to charity and that gains them a good feeling of having helped, but it's unlikely to gain them anything else. On the Steem platform charity cases generally attract much more upvotes than standard posters, because they have the advantage of offering that intangible reward. I guess that's why when charities turn out to be lies it can hurt so much more because they've stolen both money and people's goodwill.
If the system can be changed to made it more lucrative for people to support authors then I think that can only benefit everyone all around. David made a very good point in his post about most people on social media being consumers, not producers. So at the moment we are kind of scaring the consumers off and without them there will be no reward for the producers. At this point I fully comprehend @mattclarke's reasoning behind being a big supporter of comments over posts. It's currently the only way we can really reward the consumer.