Nobody disputes that comment engagement is good. And in fact my concern isn't even about the rewards themselves, but about the negative side effects of having a lot more spam. That's bad for (sincere) engagement in a lot of ways. I'm sure we've all seen comment sections and such on the internet which have been heavily polluted with spam, or tried to use email services which don't filter spam well, etc. None of these are enjoyable or sometimes even functional at all. They also don't have the additional challenges of a blockchain with finite shared resource capacity.
So I'm really not sure what is the best solution. I'm not even proposing that the curve not be removed, I'm simply raising an additional concern to be considered, and I'm reasonably sure that it a valid concern in terms of the bad side effects I mentioned (again, primarily not the rewards themselves, but rather the potentially large damage caused by spammers chasing those rewards, even if the rewards are very small)
Spam will come in anyway. The problem is easy to see on steem. The rewards doesn't matter. There will come link spam if no active curation happens.
That's what on steem happens.
IMO on hive the problem is not that big as on steem. Because the community manages it.
If the first SEO tools include hive, like gsa T2 /T3 and other ping/spam tools, there will also spam happen here.
But this is not linked to rewards. It's all because of search engine optimization. Special SINA ( China search engine and the Russian one).
The algo doesn't penalty spam links in the same way as google does.
to prevent, the easiest way would be:
Reputation under xyz = link is blank, no hyperlink, or link + low reputation = comment doesn't show up.
So downvotes matter in the case of reputation busting from spammer.
Reward farms get easily downvoted IMO. And are not worth the effort. There is more money made by spammers with affiliate spam + hide link direction via buffer side.
Noobs will always try :) No matter what we do :D