Thoughts on 50/50 Curation Split

I was reading @theycallmedan's post or listening to rather, about curation on Steem. As some of you probably know right now we have ~75% going to authors and ~25% going to curators. Making this split 50/50 is something that's come up from time to time with mixed support.

What I think I see as a common thread is that low SP holders don't like the idea and high SP holders like the idea. I think the rationale behind this is simple.

If you don't have very much SP you earn most of your Steem by Authoring posts. A policy that will take another 25% of your earnings doesn't sound great. The counter to that opinion is that more people will curate since it will be more profitable to curate and large SP holders would be more likely to delegate to curation groups like @curie instead of delegating to bidbots.

A point that @theycallmedan made was that he could get 4x more roi by delegating to a bidbot vs manual/semi-manual curation(which is what he does now, thanks for that btw) but as he accurately puts it, this is charity, and the vast majority of people are going to want to maximize profits.

So here's my opinion on the situation and an idea for a solution that works for everyone. I think that for high SP holders this seems like an obvious move and good idea, but I don't think it would be across the board. It's a big assumption that *everyone would curate more if this were enacted. I think that a lot of the Whale and Orca class probably would, but in terms of the entire userbase that is a very small amount of people. As we grow this gap will become even wider.

When a user first gets on Steem and is just trying things out authoring, curating etc. They won't earn anything on curation, because their vote is pretty much worthless. Their potential to earn, their best chance at maximizing profits is to author posts or comments.

Once you have a large stake, you can't possibly curate enough as a human being to not be throwing money away so your potential for profit maximization is through constant(automated) curation and the best solution for that is currently bidbots.

My proposed solution is that we make curation work best for different level stakeholders. The more of a stake you have, the more you can earn via curation, so you should.

What that would look like is that your curation return is varied based on your stake. So lets say someone has less than 100SP I'd say that person maybe gets 85% of their author reward so that they can earn their stake as fast as possible. Once they have 100 it goes to 75/25. Once they have 500 it goes 70/30, once they have 5000 it goes 60/40, and once they have 50000+ it's 50/50. The numbers I'm throwing out are arbitrary, but you get the idea.

This way we can give people starting out a boost to get them into the system and feeling like they matter, and the whales can maximize their profits as well as supporting the new talent on the site.

The reason I think this is a better alternative is because I think the future of Steem is not everyone getting curated by whales and curation groups, it's curation among peers, basically a strong middle class. As people move up the ladder they will transition from being a "worker" authoring as a primary means of earning to "investor" curating being their primary means of earning. I think this creates an organic path of growth on the system and would benefit everyone.

What do you all think? Let's chat in the comments! :)