To be honest, it seems to me that the attention span has always been about a day, no matter what they did with the hard forks

On this point, my feeling is different. In the "old days" there were not so many "daily bloggers". Of those, a few were good writers, with most you quickly noticed why they blogged daily. And so it was easier to follow your feed. If I - out of interest - followed someone, I also took the time to deal with his article later (just when the time window fit with me) (actually, as I did it after the first skim now with your text). And I had the feeling that users did this also "for me". Today it often seems to me that some "mass producers" have already forgotten their article from, let's say three days ago, themselves.

We think that authors create content, but maybe that's not really true

Users loyal to their own work do so.

Maybe it's the curators who create the content by signaling the things that they'll vote for.

Sure. And that's what the masses respond to, and we get to read a clear majority of the same unattractive material.

but I don't really have enough stake

Isn't that sad? And unfortunately also proof that the balance between interaction based on "social media" and pure profit thinking has been lost here.

But to return to the point of payout time. Presumably - with different points of view, a change to one day will make neither better nor worse. But we can only verify that if it is tried.
So: Courage to hardfork (after more than three years)!