This is a topic I'm always very interested in, because I think that a lot of the users-retention issues we have are deeply connected with the voting patterns of a lot of big curators, mainly those that, as you wrote, curate with others' HP.
A small premise: I know that the majority of posts on Hive are over-rewarded, because we value a lot effort and engagement, even when quality is not so high - and I'm not exlcuding myself from this, as I know that my posts wouldn't get the same rewards anywhere else.
But one thing is rewarding, even more than deserved, those that put effort in their posts, engage with other users, bring traffic to Hive - just to give an example, my small account on publish0x, where I re-post majority of my Hive-posts, averages 10.000 views per month -, build apps, games or useful tools; something completely different is rewarding those who don't help in any way Hive.
Why should someone give huge upvotes to an author which is clearly leveraging the rewards pool as a sort of passive, zero-effort source of income? None is reading those posts, they aren't driving any traffic into Hive, the author is not interacting with other users and isn't building anything here, not even their HP...
The only reasons I can find are:
- they are giving themselves those upvotes (auto-voting) or
- they are giving back those upvotes to those who upvote their posts (vote-trading)
And they think that's ok because their are using a big curation account instead of their own HP.
Or, even worse, they don't care because those are easy free money and that's enough to exploit the system as much and as long as possible.
I already said it in the past and I'm going to keep saying it as long as I will be on Hive: we should ALL try our best when curating, not giving for granted our upvotes to someone because they used to do better, helping newcomers when they put effort in what they do, even if they can't upvote back our posts, and, lastly, we should do our best to make Hive a more healtier and fairer place, where people would like to share their experiences, engage with others, build something beautiful togheter.