Curation is an important activity on Hive, but the current system may not be perfectly aligned between the curation strategies that are best for individuals (to make a profit) and the curation methods that are best for promoting good content.
Without a doubt, the people that deserve the lions share of curation rewards are those who discover and promote newer or lower tier authors (that is, those who generally receive little compensation for quality posts or who are under the radar). This is because of the amount of low value content one must fish through to find quality content.
This happens to some degree already, but the issue as I see it is the amount of time spent promoting this new material. If person A spends an hour finding a piece of top-tier content, then several weeks reposting, up voting, and commenting on the posts of that author, person B may step in just as the content gains a following and upvote to collect an equal share of the now more bountiful awards.
In order to solve this the Hive blockchain may, at some point in the future, choose to enact some version of a curation-weighted system, explained in broad strokes below.
In curation-weighted voting, you would receive a higher percentage of the curation rewards based on how supportive you recently were of a poster that suddenly becomes popular. The effect would be temporary, of course, and thus there would be more incentive to be the first to find quality content.
Thoughts?
(Written on tablet, please forgive errors)
