"This will cause a race to the bottom for authors who try to outbid each other to entice opportunistic curators looking for maximum ROI."
Curators don't know the additional curators share - they can be easily outplayed by authors. We will also allow users to set it to random.
They can read the on-chain messages sent to you in which the authors specify the number.
We already have many curators who seek max ROI, voting the same users all the time. One can argue that we level the field a little by allowing more users to enter the game.
It's a common misunderstanding that the highest ROI is achieved by always voting the highly rewarded posts. That is far from the case. So long as the rewards are above 20 HIVE or something, the curve tax is not an issue. Also, highly rewarded posts tend to have a lot of different curators voting on them trying to front run each other.
"Curation is easy to automate."
That's why we're throwing in some chaos :)
It's still easy to automate.
By the way, adding complexity will only benefit the most astute maximizers.
That's why we can have memo encryption and setting this trough website.
Of course, but it's most predictable which is good enough for many automated curators. That's why you see the same authors in trending so often.
Curation is already automated for many users, @reward.app won't change it. But we're adding something new and will observe the results. We have ways to make the curation more profitable for both manual curators and automated ones.