Part of me wishes I knew what you know but the other part reminds me of how much more I should be involved and invested to know that. Can you name names or point me and the smaller fish in the right direction? I have always tried to support the groups who welcome and support new and growing users. That, connect with and support the growers, and contribute in my small way to the next wave of dolphins who become the strongest evangelists off chain.
I thought vote selling went away with the bid-bots but I guess that is not the case.
There's many smaller curation projects that launch but they don't get as much support I reckon. Take @topcomment for instance, you delegate, get return on the delegation, they take a fee for their work and they focus solely on curating great comments. You as a delegator are fine with it because that's what they said they'd do and as long as they keep their promise of sending you part of the curation rewards and curating great comments it's a win-win for hive.
The bad ones are those who instead of doing what they sought out to do, would focus their curation mainly on those delegating. Now you're both getting majority of your delegation from curation rewards back but on top of it votes that don't reflect on how great your comments are compared to anyone else, they only vote you because you're giving them that delegation and in turn they're getting a fee. They also don't spend much time curating so the fee they're getting is close to "free" hive for them since they rely on the greed of the delegators to both get curation rewards and an upvote, i.e. double-dipping the rewards pool.
Now anyone who isn't delegating to this project is earning less compared to them and since we have a shared reward pool that obviously means there's winners and losers. In this case the winners aren't those putting in effort into curating what they're focus is, in this case comments and sharing the rewards with delegators while taking a fee for their work, the winners are those who have bots set up to autovote comments from delegators without much oversight. That's basically what's happening but with posts and through layer 2 tokens rather than delegations in some cases or direct hive bids for votes.