I think this is a great move and fully support it. By sacrificing your curation rewards, you're protecting the goose in hopes of more future golden eggs. It's the rational actor motivations of the top accounts on this platform which will make or break it. Sure a whale could act selfishly or dump too much STEEM on the market, but they are (currently) acting smart enough to realize this would only hurt themselves on a long enough timescale.

I missed out on being considered for your author list, and I'd like to submit my blog for consideration if you choose to add new authors. But here's my caveat: From time to time, I'll still publish a post about Steemit. I write about my passions, and clearly my lack of sleep lately would indicate I'm passionate about Steemit. I think it has a very good chance of improving human well-being over the long term.

If you're open to suggestions, here's one which might still qualify me as a candidate for your list:

Improve your bot's algorithm and have it search the content of a post for steem, steemit, steem power, etc and only give an upvote if those words are not present. You could also ensure no posts with the steemit category get a vote from your bot.

This would enable you to support great authors which will improve the entire ecosystem of Steemit (as you're already doing), while at the same time giving them artistic freedom to write however they want. The only other alternative I can think of would be to give authors a special keyword they could add to their post which, if found, would exclude that post from your bots automatic upvote.

Thanks for your consideration and, so far, for being a rational actor thinking in terms of longer times scales. :)