RE: Although subjectively downvoting posts to zero is anathema to me, the Layer 1 ability to do so must remain (for now at least)

All these discussion is leading to if we want rewards at all on the Layer 1. More and more I am geting inclined to that we do not. Layer 1 can just be for the stakeholders we move the author rewards to Layer 2. Which is basically the main content of this post.

That is certainly an alternative that merits discussion.

I have often felt that the current model is not very investor-centric. I don't know of many investors who would want to bother with 'curating' in order to maximize their investment.

With that said, Hive's value proposition is far deeper than social media. Keeping social media rewards as a Layer 1 feature need not be a sacred cow, imho. However, I don't see any immediate advantages to eliminating social media rewards from Layer 1, and there would definitely be disruptions associated with doing so -- and thus unforeseeable unintended consequences.

A middle-of-the-road solution might be to enable stakeholders to 'delegate' a portion of their HP to a special account that continually self-votes half its HP (i.e. allows its voting manna to exceed 100% exactly half the time), then returns 100% of those rewards to the delegators. Basically, that allows investors to choose whether they want to curate or whether they just want to bank their would-be curation rewards, without hassling with curating (and they can choose how much of their stake they want to apportion each way, and can change that percentage from time to time).

The advantage would be that the reward pool will be larger (because the special account only votes half the time) and there would be much fewer autovoters muddying up manual curation efforts.