If we want the site to grow in popularity and turn into a 'mainstream' social media site, new users need to feel like they can join up, post good content, and get rewarded for it based on the quality of what they produce.
Which is why post details needs to be removed especially author as they negatively influence curators.
If you look at reddit, the voting mechanism works well, the content that gets on top is the content that gets the more upvote. Why does it work well? Because redditors speak with their heart not with their pocket, steemit should hide the money aspect as much as possible from the site if they want people to behave naturally.
I don't know why people are upvoting the already trending threads so much, as dan said there is no incentives to do so, its the sheep effect i guess. If you remove post informations ( amount vote and author) then people will only have content to decide whether they want to upvote or not which is exactly how it is supposed to be.
I don't know if I 100% agree with the idea to remove that information. Authors that are building a following will want people to know it is them who are posting. Some people do use other people's ratings to help figure out what they want to spend time reading. Also, that information is still available on the blockchain, so removing it from the site would not prevent bots from using it.
The fact that people are voting on what the think will be popular vs. what they think is good is one of the main problems.
That, and there is not much incentive to search out 'undiscovered' content that won't be getting upvoted by a bunch of whales.