There is nothing unique about the HiveGC posts to the point they can be automated just a list of votes and the image of the post and done. There is no editorial or content outside of just listing the votes issued.
As for poshtoken, many users have been flagged for using post and comment rewards to fund projects, that’s what the dhf was designed for so the community can decide if it should be funded by community funds.
Yeah, you're right about the hgc posts, I contacted one of the curators after I placed the comment to improve on that.
And yes, it just seemed like such a small project at the time that the funding wouldn't really cross more than 3-5k hive which at those prices was not much to bother going through the DHF - considering every thing else that gets rewarded it seemed like the easiest method at the time for something as important as POSH but for the next step which will be bigger we will definitely go through the DHF.
I just mainly wanted to point out that compared to others in that list who just get the rewards personally these two things stand out.
I'm not sure editorial content is the right test. If the posts evidence ongoing value contribution then its fine to vote them IMO. Some automated or repetitious posts might do that, some not (others to some degree but not justifying the rewards paid).
What I mean in the case of HiveGC posts is it is just a post of what votes the account made, no further information outside of the link to the post and image.
What if everyone decided to make a post that showcased who they voted for the day and got $50+ for it.
I'd say it depends how and why the votes are made. If there is a whole lot of value added by those particular votes, then maybe. If someone is just voting haphazardly or otherwise uselessly and then posting about how they voted, then certainly not.
FWIW, the curators do a lot more than just picking the best posts of that day along with many restrictions and requirements (such as checking for plagiarism, not rewarding the same authors too often, etc) such as being helpful in Discords to newcomers and the community, keeping the community clean with roles and other diverse things.
OCD's target to reward curators has been around 10% of the votes that land on the content of the authors, meaning if there's 5 posts that were picked to be highlighted for a community in a certain day and they got about $300 in rewards, we'd attempt to vote the reports for about $30, though price actions recently have asked for a lot of adjustments here and there. There are a few exceptions* of some projects under our wing such as the lovesniper project where there's a lot more work being done behind the scenes and other reasons where we can't respect the 10% rule, one of them is that too many attempt to plagiarise/fake introduction posts so we're better off rewarding unvouched intro posts a bit lower to not encourage such activity.