I understand your frustration. I'm also frustrated that curation is less organic than it should be. But it has gotten better from the era of bid bots. We have to consider that humans will be humans and we cannot go around expecting them to behave altruistically when behaving selfishly is strongly incentivised. That is an impossible dream, and we can either embrace that and try to iterate on the current system and build something a little bit better each time, approaching the world we would like to see... or we can give up like you say you did.
Which one is more productive?
I don't even understand what you think is particulary inorganic about @curangel's curation. It literally makes no sense. It's just like a big account doing its own human curation, except that there are several curators and not just one. Have you actually looked at the compilations and what is voted, or are you just damning the whole project because the votes come from a large account?
q morpheus: What if I told you ...
... that you are the one who gave up by embracing curangel.
I'd tell you that memes don't make myopic bullshit any less myopic.
So, who do you think benefits the most from curangel or ocd ?
Do independent curators, who vote the stuff they enjoy reading, benefit from curangel ?
Do influencers, who have a large audience (and seem to avoid Hive), benefit from curangel ?
Actually, yes.
One of the biggest issues with the curation rewards system as it is, is that there's hardly any time to vote manually after reading, which is really how it should work. This was already bad but got even worse when we moved from the 30-minute reverse-auction window down to 5 minutes.
However, because of the way @curangel votes posts with a several-hour delay on average, there is usually plenty of time for independent curators to vote content they were already going to vote before @curangel gets there. Assuming you understand how curation rewards work, you should recognise that this is actually very good for those independent curators who get their votes in first.