Positives: Incentivizes quality content, encourages community building.
Negatives: Curation does not work correctly, centralization of voting rewards.

Thoughts & Suggestions:

Beginners will run into a wall that is the learning curve called Steemit. The site is poorly designed with its topics. Go to YouTube. The main focus is on the search bar as well as trending. It encourages exploration. Go Steemit. The main focus is on your home page. This does not encourage exploration.

Curation is broken. Why have a 30 minute delay before the rewards are split favorably for curation? This encourages the votes to focus on the whales rather than the unknown. I can curate content on the new stream but you won't maximize return until after 30 minutes and by then its long gone!

Also in terms of curation, why not reward the early voters of a piece of content? Why not give them a small bonus. A finders fee? But bots could abuse this and users would be incentivized to upvote themselves more.

Sure, that's why we implement this fix and prohibit self-upvoting until the value of the post/comment exceeds that of the self-upvote. Thus, whales can't self upvote until the community verifies their post is worthy. This will also eliminate self upvoting abuse in the comments.

As for bots hunting for early curation rewards, I'm not sure how to combat that. But the downside of that is that new users will get immediate upvotes and encourage them to keep putting the effort in rather than resort to begging and spamming. The only issue is that they ignore quality, but most bots today do the same so not as big of an issue if done properly.