I would really like to look into how we can make things fairer for the small vote counts. If I am correct, vote counts under $5.00 are penalized in that the amount rewarded is less than the theoretical value of the upvote given, and that the opposite occurs on vote counts above that threshold.
In my view, upvoting comments is at least half of what a social media should do.
I notice a clear lack of upvoting on comments, and I think it is attributable to the fact that you get less reward than you would if you just looked for something crossing the $5.00 mark, regardless of whether it's good or not. (As people know, I vote comments anyway, because I think they are extremely important - engagement is one of the keys to success and it needs to be rewarded - all the well knowing that I'm actually hurting my ROI.)
Comments would also be more difficult to create curation trails for, I would think, if not impossible, thus dealing effectively with part of the issue.
If we were to go one step further and reverse the reward growth as the count grows on the larger vote counts, that would also further thwart the curation trails, again, I would think.
The long and the short of this would be not the elimination of curations trails, but a reduction in their profitability - meaning that they would still be an option for those who don't have the time. However, those who do have the time would have much more incentive to manually curate.
I think offering an opt-out staking option would completely defeat what HIVE is meant to be. Everybody would opt-out (except for a handful of diehards) and we'd be just one more staking cryptocurrency among hundreds.
For more than one reason, the most important being to foster community, but in this case to combat autovoting, I think the best way to address the issue is a dual approach that makes the small vote counts fairer while throttling down the rewards of the larger vote counts at the same time.
RE: Proposal: reduce Hive inflation by reducing curation rewards