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The original rules were in fact 50/50 between curation and author rewards. The "75% author, 25% curator" change and the "author gets most of rewards during first 30 minutes" change led to many of the abusive self-voting of contentless posts and comments that we see today, IMO. Fortunately, the "author gets most of the rewards during the first 30 minutes" was overturned with HF20. But the 75/25 change still exists.

IMO, changing back to 50/50 will lead to improved curation results (better posts will rise to the top again) which I think will lead to increased Steem prices (which will benefit all long term participants in the Steem economy). If you want to understand my rationale, I went into much more detail a long time ago in this post (it's a long post and note that some of the full explanations are in the comments):

https://steemit.com/steem/@blocktrades/voting-abuse-and-ineffective-curation-a-proposal-for-blockchain-level-change

Hello @blocktrades. I focus on content production mainly, but use the stake I've earned to curate manually. I do not purchase votes, ever. With this approach I'm able to speak from experience.

Recently, my content earned enough to generate roughly 50 SP for curators within a seven day time period with about 1 post per day. With 23500SP, I'm able to curate manually without paying much attention to timing and earn around 50 SP in curation rewards. Basically I'm getting the full value of my content because I'm curating to make up for what I lose to curators.

What I see with 50/50: More people voting, which equals higher rewards on posts. So curators can take 50 percent and in some cases, due to more incoming votes, people coming out with higher rewards than before. Then if they're in the position someone like me is in, they can make up for the 50 percent loss by curating others and seeing a larger portion of curation reward flow in. I can see myself earning more with 50/50 simply because of the added incentive to vote. It seems like the 50/50 would create enough incentive to lead up to a positive feedback loop. Purely speculation of course.

If others wanted to be in my situation, they could simply power up their earnings like I did. The incentive is there, and that also contributes to this positive feedback loop I speak of.

I also have a link to share with you. I offer the perspective of a content producer who's been around for over two years, what struggles we face. Sometimes we don't have much of a voice here, but this is mine. Near the bottom I offer a possible solution to some of the chaos we're experiencing and a way to bring in new money to the platform, the smart way, using a proven business model with some added innovation. Power through it if you have time. I feel it's worth it.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@nonameslefttouse/turning-rage-into-the-soothing-steem-now-blowing-out-my-butt-as-i-mince-my-words-for-you-the-reader-of-this

So many bloggers will be totally pisst, changing to 50% Curation would mean that authors get less money per article.

A very drastic and unnecessary move. I remember those days, and we did not have any quality articles. With few exceptions, it was for the most part "circle jerking" going on back then.

We want the people to thrive here, not so fun watching you $8 post, knowing you only going to get $4.

Let's forget about going back and instead speed up these account creation. That system works way too slow, rather fix that because we do want people to come here.

First, I disagree with your assessment of quality "now" vs "then", especially if we're talking about the trending page.

I think you're missing the key point of Kevin's post and my earlier one: the current 75/25 split encourages self-voting of nearly contentless posts over voting for quality posts written by others. The idea behind increasing rewards for curation is to reward voters who vote on quality posts (by which they gain curation rewards) rather than just voting for their own posts or their socket puppet posts (by which they gain author rewards).

The idea is to change the economic incentives to cause voters to behave in a way that better content rises to the top. At 75/25 the economics are totally weighted in favor of self-voters. If you follow that out to its long-term end, the self-voters end up with all the coin.

As far as upsetting bloggers, I believe the final result will be to make them happier (especially if they are good bloggers, as the change in voting will reward "better" content more than "crap" content). The primary driver for higher rewards for both authors and curators is a higher Steem price. Anything we can do that moves the price of Steem higher benefits everyone in the Steem community. Having Steem work properly as a efficient content curator will make the coin more attractive. The current self-voting issues are a big black eye for the coin.

I would be quite happy with that. Getting $4 from $8 is better than getting $3 from $4. However, I imagine it might create a little problem for bot owners.