Couple Ideas:

• Make downvotes blind. More people would downvote more because they wouldn't fear as much retaliation.

• Make is so anyone set up with a voting bot or trail automatically receives less curation returns. Isn't there a way to see all users who participate?

• Remove timing altogether and make curation simply a pool of your HP compared to all others. Most autovotes are to provide incentive for timing to get better curation returns. Just make is so if you vote in the 7 day period you get paid based on that. Why reward timing of a vote for curation? Maybe I'm missing the point of that.

• Remove trending and force people to follow more. There is hardly any incentive to follow. You follow good authors and it's easier to manually curate. Also make it so you see what your followers like/comment/resteem kind of like how twitter works by default. Going to trending takes work and on hive.blog it's the default landing page.

My opinion is that active hive users should in fact be more rewarded, they add value to the platform through engagement. This is an interesting topic. I see a lot accounts come to Hive to only cross post, I hate to see that especially when they never engage and are essentially coming to hive solely to milk it. I like to call them platform whores :) I don't like the idea of making curation rewards less. Honestly if you did that, I'd unstake all my Hive right away and just try to pull in author rewards only to sell it on exchanges.