TL;DR - DON'T change the n^2 voting algorithm. Change it so that n varies with the square root of the voters Steem Power (instead of the Steem Power itself).
So . . . . we've come back around to the topic of curation awards. For the most part, I agree strongly with ats-david's defense of them. However, I strongly disagree with the belief that "piling on" is the true source of any problems. Piling on is only a problem because predicting a whale vote is so lucrative.
Indeed, I would argue that the outrageously massive effects of whale curation is the ONLY currently obvious problem with curation awards.
A new user can come into SteemIt, spend about $15 and get 100 Steem Power. With this, they have 0.00002 (1/50,000th) the voting power of the largest whales. Users like @clayop and @smooth have noted that the n^2 voting algorithm makes this even worse (to the extent of effectively having 0.0000000004 the voting power) and have proposed changing the algorithm to n log(n) in order to fix the problem. I argue that they are fixing the wrong problem and introducing unwanted side effects.
The correct solution is to use the square root of the voter's Steem Power instead of the full amount. In this case, the new voter has 0.0045 (1/224th) the voting power of the largest whales.
While investment should be rewarded, there is really no reason why whales should be entitled to make such a killing with every vote and influence the community *so* heavily -- particularly since getting in early was the only real investment that many dolphins made. Inequality of opportunity is a huge problem in the world and it is sad to see it replicated here when new users basically cannot get curation rewards except by front-running whales.
What do you say 
