I'm tired of all the bots as well, I actually posted about this yesterday lol. This is ruining the experience for me, and I'm sure many others. Wait til the "I made $10,000 online this month" bots start getting released into the wild... it can only get worse unless there is a system in place to weed them out and get rid of them. Personally, I don't think making "downvote" bots is the answer either, it just makes a bigger mess.
One question though: I'm kind of curious about how the curation rewards work, do you have a link to a quick read on that which explains it like I'm 5?
There are some posts, but the ones I found seem out of date. Basically in simplest terms, your rewards are proportional to your voting power (if you vote very frequently your voting power decreases, over 24 hours it recharges to maximum), your rewards are proportional to something like SP*log(SP), where SP is the amount of steem power you hold in your account, and your rewards depend on WHEN you vote. If you vote immediately after something is posted, you only receive about 1% of what you could have, and the rest goes to the original poster. If you vote 30 minutes later, you receive 100%. In between it changes linearly. If you vote at 15 minutes, you and the author both split your curation reward evenly. There is also a factor that you want to vote before a post is popular (i.e. before it has a large $ reward). That's because you are kind of "discovering" the content, so it is more valuable than voting for something at the top of trending.
Hmm... so you're saying I shouldn't have voted for this right away? lol
I understand what you are saying. Not sure I understand why that is the case though, you'd think that the sooner you vote on something, the more you would receive percentage-wise. I suppose I'll have to adjust my voting strategy, never knew there was one!
That's how it was originally, the sooner you vote the better, but they changed it because it gave bots too much of an advantage.
More proof that bots ruin the user experience. They just need to get rid of them entirely.