The way I envision this working is basically the same as "Submit a Story" but uses a simplified form. The form would accept a title, URL, and categories.
But the key here is, it does not pay author rewards, only curation and reputation. Since it doesn't take much skill to share interesting links, it should only pay if there's curation value.
The reason I think this is an important feature is because not everyone on Steemit is a content creator. A nice side-effect is that the original content creator gets attention, perhaps even referrer traffic from Steemit. Referrer traffic will appear in the original content creator's access logs, which will promote the platform.
Here are a few example of what I'm talking about, only instead of just sharing the link, I manually imported content into the post, added links to the original article, and selected 'Decline Payout':
Then again, perhaps the above approach is just the right way to do it. But I think it'd be quicker to just paste a link.
If this feature was implemented, I envision that under the hood the shared link might also populate the body of the post with some kind of preview so it gets thumbnails and perhaps video embeds.
If you haven't already noticed, yes this is basically a Reddit feature I'd like to see formally implemented on Steemit.
