i read the title in the url and thought "a field of dandilions, oh this shit is gonna be deep, i wonder how steem is like a field of dandilions... oh wait this is just... wait this is just 3 pictures of dandilions voted up to over 120... oh i see..."
i've actually been thinking about this alot lately, and i really am starting to think this boils down to the fact that SBD is soooooo out of whack in price relative to steem...
while SBD is directly convertible into steem (1 SBD = $1 worth of steem) but steem is not directly convertible into SBD... the price discrepancy incentivizes users to 1) upvote and 2) buy votes because thats the only way the protocol allows SBD to be created from steem.
if we allowed a direct operation for converting steem into SBD, i think it would remove alot of the profits from vote buying and self-voting, but as it is these are the only two mechanisms for taking advantage of the SBD arbitrage price.
I agree with locking the price of Steem to SBD, but so many people are against it. Especially the whales, who would have the most to lose. Making money off arbitrage and self-voting / creating fake curation trails (as in the example I posted above) is, for whales, free money. And that's what so many of the 'investors' use this platform for. It's a god damn money making machine, and all they have to do is make the 'appearance' of content.
A vast divergence between steem and sbd is just one other way for them to use this money-making machine.