As an active curator that most of the time strives to vote on content I know will probably not see many votes after mine due to it being new users, etc. I have thought about this for a long time which changes would help out to incentivize curation more for all accounts involved.

Even though curation has a much bigger inventive here than say on other platforms such as Reddit it can still be finetuned more and I hope it will become better over time and experiments.

The curation penalty for voting early should be changed somewhat. I know this was put in place because of bots voting on the same second a post was released by authors they knew will gather a lot of votes but this was also done at a time when people were already using bots for their 40 daily votes. Now with only 10 daily votes and a bigger inventive to vote manually this could incentivize curators to check through the 'new' section more often in hopes of finding the gems that people don't already have on automatic bots.

Combined with that I think we need to rething the curve of rewarding curation where the first voters receive a much bigger piece of the pie than those voting last. I've noticed that often even if you are the last to vote you still make a decent amount of curation rewards if your stake is big, this would at the same time discourage curators from voting on friends and the popular authors if they notice it has already garnered big amount of rewards and they might consider voting on something newer or with less rewards instead.

At the same time, increasing the curation reward pool and decreasing the post reward one would activate more authors to start voting.

There are a lot of things that can still be improved on and experimented with and I'm sure we will be able to find a better balance over time.

I also noticed the lack of mention of delegation in your post, having read a post of Hive account@benjojo recently I have to admit that its like a superpower and in the right hands it will make curation even more effective on the platform.

I am for instance delegating my own SP further to the curators of Hive account@ocd and we are looking to growing over time in amount of curators and delegation with the platform and its userbase to make sure that less and less quality and new authors get overlooked.

Steem has a lot of incentives and even though not all of them are being used to their max extent yet I believe it will get better and better over time.

Sorry for possible typos, wrote this on my phone with a Swedish keyboard. :P