What's so misleading about that? they seem to hover around 11-13%APR. That strategy obviously works.
Look at the timestamps. No actual curators curate like that. Which curators are voting and keeping their VP around 97-100% at all times? Which curators make sure they are the single large vote on the posts? Which curators vote in quick successions between posts?
It's time for everyone on Hive to stop kidding themselves with the whole "curation" nonsense. It's simply rare. It's mostly semi-auto or automated.
11-13% APR actually sucks.
14-16% APR is trivial to accomplish regardless of how large a stake you have by auto-voting in extremely small chunks. You only need to make a suitable list of authors and optimize your timing. Even the optimization can be automated.
Not individuals in possession of only a small stake. Curation projects with a large stake manually go through large numbers of posts. They have tools for quickly putting together lists of candidate posts, which they browse and then drop votes of that size on posts that meet their criteria. By voting at 10% you can only vote 100 times a day. That's not very much. I'd take your claim more seriously if they dropped a lot of sub-1% votes in which case they'd have to vote over 1000 times a day. Even that could be doable with a team, though.
Curators who have developed a routine and tools for finding posts. It's completely misguided to compare the behavior of a curation project to a regular Hive user who typically hardly even opens more than a dozen posts a day.
That's the only valid criticism from an efficiency of PoB point of view you have made so far.
Curation projects whose curators have developed a routine where they process a large number candidate of posts quickly.
Back in the day before the EIP when @appreciator, @upmewhale and @rocky1 were bid bots unlike the manual curators they're today, curation on Steem was nothing but circle jerking (except for @curangel, @curie and @ocdb and maybe a project I'm not aware of). From a stake distribution point of view, it was a shit show. The situation is VASTLY BETTER now than it was back then. This is as good as it gets. Would you rather go back to vote buying and circle jerks?
All right. Please. Give a list of all Hive users with significant stake that do 17%+ curation APR. The APR becomes harder and harder to push up the bigger your stake.
They put in that weight because of a certain curation curve. You only put in sub 1% if you are frontrunning. If you have large stake, you want enough to beat the curve and be the single largest vote on the post.
They VOTE through large number of candidates quickly. It's not uncommon to have some of those votes retracted due to HW or someone tipping them off something was wrong.
Try doing some anti-abuse sometimes. Most curators don't dig that deep. There's no time for that. They vote first and usually don't ask questions.
I was flagging long before people got bailed out by the subsidized downvotes.
There are still circlejerks that exist, but like to disguise themselves as a "community". You just don't see it on the surface. There are backroom deals that exist, but you don't see vote buying on-chain.