However upvoting published content to trending page gives people hope to get some exposure and traffic.
Which is why people should be curating and voting quality up to the trending page, instead of all the crap paid programming we see there today. Thousands left because they had no hope of ever making it here. If I can go out and buy the trophy that says I'm the best golfer in the world, I don't even need to learn how to golf.
I do think that everybody starts with the same mindset, just like politicians. They start with the idea writing good quality posts (or at least the best they can) and curating good posts! But when there account grows, their mindset changes and do find a more effective way to increase their steem power. As a result they will be manual voting less often.
The lesser SP an account has, the more they will do manual upvoting.
I do also forsee that voting bots will change their business case into curation bots! Probably they will vote on the posts from people who do delegate SP to them. In that case the users don't need to buy votes directly but them will get them because they delegate. The profit the bot makes with curating will be shared under the delegators.
I did start around 1.5 years ago. And still I am not earning much. I do feel that they bigger accounts, besides a few exception, aren't manually curating, which brought us in this situation!
Personally I do think that the 50/50 split will discourage a lot of authors to write posts. In HF20, they would earn for instance 1 steem, while after HF21 this would be dropped to 0.5 steem. Most of us do have probably a limit which they do find it worth it to post, so lot's of them will dropp out. The bigger account won't do the manual curating, they will probably keep on using tools like smartsteem or delegate to curating bots.
In this scenario, one can think that more people will vote on more different post from more different authors but I doubt it.
I myself haven't been discovered by lots of whales or Orca's. So in my case value of my posting will stay the same, but they return 25% Steem, SP or SBD. While I do want to look at the bigger picture, because a strong steem is good for all of us, I will keep on writing, but lot's will just stop!
Cheers,
Peter