Thanks for taking your time to write your suggestion but honestly, I am not in favor of the idea.

I don't want to see people competing for just 500 Steem. To be honest, trending authors can make 200+ Steem (or 100% SP), they can get to as high as 500+ Steem if their post is good enough. And curators are doing their job so nicely nowadays.

And if you now suggest the weekly competition, then I would like to bring it into your knowledge that @steemvoter used to pick a winner and award the author with votes worth of $200+ on daily/weekly basis (Before HF19, the awards used to be $500 to $1,000). So, the system is already tested.

Self-upvoted to make my comment more visible :)