I’ve talked about this for about two and a half years, but this is basically why I’m in favor of higher curation rewards:

If we want more and better curation, we need to incentivize it. If we want more investment, we need to incentivize it. And if we truly understand that social media is not comprised of 100% bloggers and commenters – that the simple act of voting on content is actually the largest chunk of interaction – then we need to make it more lucrative for content consumers to easily invest and earn for the quality work that they contribute.

Curation rewards are that mechanism for bringing in more investors, for likely keeping them more engaged, and for bringing in a wider base of users that are not solely here to create low-quality content and not promote it, then hope for big rewards...and then ultimately become disappointed for not earning from their lack of quality, effort, and experience with social media and networking.

That excerpt was taken from here:
https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-witness/block-change-you-can-believe-in