Hi Marius, I'm glad to know your good intentions for the steem ecosystem, your final note have stated the best possible outcome that could happen with the combined effort of the steem community.

As for our curation style, the approach that I did is to run a contest that will motivated the participants to:

• produce a certain theme of photo using a specific #tag
• generate engagement among participants through comment contest
• reward winning participants with tokens to have an added "sense of being recognize"

I believe there are other projects who use a similar format.

The winning participants' posts will then be collated in a single post and then share to other platforms via tweet, reddit, medium...etc
Currently, I'm utilizing twitter.
There are new users who mentioned that they learn about steem or steemit through twitter or facebook.

This method could also be applied to general "quality" long form of contents. A curator could perform in this manner:

• upvote quality contents
• collate in a single post and provide a credible introduction about the featured author(s) & their post
• post to Steemit
• cross post / share link to Reddit or Medium to attract attention

The goal is to motivate Steem users to produce quality contents and encourage engagement among other users.