While you're right that lotsa folks making bank curating wouldn't like it, I don't like it for another reason.
Just as it would encourage curation of unknown authors and obscure posts, there's no preference for quality. In fact, it would encourage curating total crap, because the crappiest posts would attract the least curator attention.
That's not the incentive I think we want to create.
Good, original thinking though!
Yeah, I was thinking about this after posting last night. People could create bots that simply seek out posts that have few votes on them. But the rewards are more decentralized.
The biggest issue is that there is no quality discovery mechanism build into Steem that cannot be gamed. Squared rewards were initially intended to reward quality discovery, but were easily gamed.
The biggest dilemma in curation rewards is how does one fool a machine when the task is as simple as clicking on a button at a particular time and place?
The biggest issue is that this continues to be the elephant. But it’s a fallacy because it assumes that everybody wants only quality. If that were the case TMZ, Perez Hilton, daily soaps, shopping channels, and so much mor would never have become popular.
But the reality is that everyone is free to fork an interface and implement their own additional layers. The fact that Steem Inc believes in open source doth not necessarily equate that it is ours to totally play with. Unless of course, we are fine with a lower degree of popularity. Which Steem Inc. Most definitely is and which is one of the reasons why condenser and all other libraries used on steemit.com are open source.
But, please, stop trying to enforce quality as a metric. What to you is quality may be exhausting to somebody else. And that’s a pedestal of elitism one needs to come down from.
Or fork into.
Even poor quality content can find an audience. There’s hundreds, thousands, millions probably, of content/news regurgitating sites online who have enough of an audience to continue operating viably. Quality? Not to me because I prefer HackerNews over PCWorld. But apparently good enough for their audience.