I used to make 1-2 SP a day curating. Now I make 4-6. I vote without reading any content and don't care about the content. Every few hours when I have a free minute I look what has the most potential that has been created about 30 min ago. That's what I vote for.
I'm sure I have no idea what I am doing, but I was able to vote with a strategy vs for what I like and increase my reward tremendously.
That is horrible. It accomplishes the exact opposite of what it is supposed to do.
You have 11000 SP. So yes you can make a little bit, say 4-6 per day via bad curation. You are apparently doing quite a bit worse than @alexgr who commented elsewhere on this thread about making about 5/day, except that he only has 3000 SP. So your strategy is actually not very good. I don't know how you assess the posts with the "most potential" without reading any of them. Apparently you can't, which is not surprising.
Curation is competitive. If you continue to curate poorly, you will make a little, sure, but you will fall behind other curators who do a better job, and over time their earnings and accumulated SP will greatly exceed yours. That is exactly how it should be.
I understand your argument. Most of this world has been forged via competition and survival of the fittest. Sometimes strategies that seem not intuitive actually work. I.e. a male lion killing all other male lions that are not his kids. It seems it destroys part of its own species, but what it actually does improve the quality of DNA pool overall.
If we wanted to create the best curators than this skill game strategy is the perfect way to do it and it would also not matter if it were human or a bot.
However is our goal not to build something that many people like. So including many people is important and then making them pick winners vs picking the best people pick the winner.
Is the goal to pick the best content or is the goal to have many people decide what good content is?
Maybe I mis-understand the objective.
Thank you for the dialog and sharing your thoughts. I am certainly learning from it.
It is both. You have SP. SP has the ability to vote. You can decide how you want to use your SP: Do you you want to play the competitive curation-for-rewards game, or just be a late voter and vote for what you like? Voting for what you like is exactly how you express your preferences to the earlier voters (i.e. professional, competitive curators, human and/or bot). The earlier voters are rewarded when later voters (who are basically unrewarded) support their picks. But how are the later voters rewarded?
In return for rewarding the earlier voters, the later voters get this: Those earlier voters will in the future to the maximum extent possible, deliver to you exactly what you want, curated from as many sources as possible, as quickly as possible in much the same was as Google tries to deliver to you the search results you want or Facebook delivers to you the feed contents you want, except of course in those two cases or others like them, there is no transparency nor are they necessarily choosing based on your preferences (as opposed to theirs). They will do this because whichever early curator gets the most later votes will get the biggest rewards.
Right now, competition is low, so it makes some sense for you to compete even if not doing a very good job. In the future, competition will be much tougher. By not reading the posts and voting on any somewhat-viable-looking crap anyway, you might earn 0.001 or not even that (in fact smart competitive curators might even try to actively sabotage you with decoy posts). It won't be worth it and you will decide you might as well just vote what you like and be rewarded with the services of the really good curators.
I don't think it is necessarily quite this simple because portions of the market may mature (become highly competitive) at different rates and to different degrees. People will also have different competitive advantages. If there are Urdu posts, I'll probably not do a very good job of curating them, but native Urdo speakers might be good at it. That market might be too small for high powered bots (and bot-human collaborations) to make sense for a longer period of time, and thus remain more open to casual curators-for-reward much longer than the larger English market. Likewise for various other niches.
Does this make sense?
Sure. But the point of my argument is that I used to just vote for things I liked. Making no curation reward. Now that I vote a little more tactical I've tripled my reward.
That is bad I think.
I don't think competition is good here. I think we should make people pick what they want? Maybe I am wrong though.
I understand the original idea behind creating the competitive game: we want people to pick good content.
However I don't think the objective is being met. Instead people who have superior voting strategy get most of the rewards driving normal people away.