Unfortunately this is becoming all too common. People work so hard at finding ways to game the system, when the effort would be better used to make real content.
There needs to be some sort of incentive to those who have big SP numbers to get out and reward good content. If someone sees that they can upvote themselves for 5 cents, but the next person with the same vote power is getting $5, they will go to see how that person got $5 and mimic it. Hopefully we can teach people that good content reaps good rewards, rather than posting crap content a lot reaps a lot of little rewards.
It can be really hard to find GOOD content some days, so I feel for the big fish who just want to stick to the people they know, but SOMEBODY needs to show the minnows that effort pays off. And it can't just be @curie.
Just my 2 cents worth!
I think we need to encourage less elitistic curation afterall the ones investing real money in the platform need to help create adoption and engagement.
The system is totally open and it is up to those who posses the SP to share the rewards pool in a fairer way to entice the users to remain.
I have helped about 30 people to join, and most have just abandoned after a few days of making the mistake of giving it all in first posts not having a follower base.
I powered up to encourage them, but now most dont post...
I just got 1 message from one of them very happy because her poetry thing made 15 cents... !
The only thing we can do is lead by example, i had big hopes when i joined, now i realized 4k SP are nothing and i vote a small population.
I beleived initially that with some SP and making tools other would like the effort and join to help but with some exceptions almost everyone here is too busy chasing a vote to care about others.
Then you have the smart guys who come up with this techniques thinking since everyone is doing it at some level it will go unnoticed (which for the most part is true)
It is not good content that reaps good rewards is good intentions and value what does.
Afterall what is good content ?
What might be perfect for you can seem boring to me... I do vote based on engagement created by the post, not based on the post itself and i do vote when i find the posts i dont look for curation rewards that is a big fish game my best week using all sort of techniques i got about 5 dollars curation and to get that i had to refrain from voting content that i would have liked voting.
So i told my self, screw this, i vote when i see them not when is rentable to do it.
This place has a lot of things to enhance, but it is up to us the users to shape the way we woould like to see it.
That is one of the criteria i use to choose my witness votes, see what are they doing to take this into the direction i would like to see this place steered, same reason i became a witness, in the hopes of one day have a say
"...when the effort would be better used to make real content."
Effort? No, there is little effort in what these people do. You run a bot and it does all of the work and they sit back and watch the money roll in. These sort of selfish schmucks don't care about the community and won't listen.