For the latter, there's a lot of work involved there as well. While we do try to keep the rewards reasonable I don't see this as a "they're getting rewarded for other people's content" kind of thing. They've gone out of their way to look for these underrewarded accounts to reward them, sure not everyone can get in such a position to earn rewards for doing manual work to look for them but I highly believe the pros outweigh the cons. I'm sure there's many authors who continued using Hive because they received curation when most others ignored them, is getting a small % of the votes they give for having found that user in the first place bad? If we can find a way to reward manual curation extra compared to auto that's a win in my book since the other way to do it (by lowering rewards of autovoters) causes a lot of drama.
Now there's of course bad examples of this as well, some who just curate friends or people already well rewarded or users who are easy to find just to get some extra rewards. Then there's some projects who monetize curation reports while not even being able to give the original author a decent sized vote, they just use that as a reason to farm. I'm all against that and I'd be the first to remove such curators from any curation project I run (and we some times do).
For instance there was a community leader that was invited to our onboarding program but he focused so much on curating in other communities/initiatives just to maximize the curation rewards provided by us rather than focusing on his own community - we had to remove him due to that.
It is assumed that 50% of the rewards go to curation. But it was invented that you have to pay others to make automation work, so there is manual curation but from automated participation. A curation that is not organic, does not generate interaction. Besides, those reports are not original content, while authors are forbidden to repost, some accounts do it for them.
There are hundreds of accounts doing reports and as you say, some with very little HP, but how can you say no to them if others do the same? it would even look like a monopoly of curation reports in which only the big ones can participate.
I don't see bad a weekly report that brings value with an analysis of why the best ones were selected. But I find the daily reports spammy and that most of the time they get more votes than the original author.
Another problem with this is that many people will see the report as a summary, avoiding to browse the community and interact with the authors, even if they think it is advertising, the reality is that most of them stay in the report.
The solution to this is the beneficiary of the communities. Even so it is more “fair” the “competition” between projects.
I have even seen reports from individuals (not projects, not trails).
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
I take this opportunity to tell you about something that happened to me in this regard and that serves as an example to see the abuses that these reports bring:
I posted in the largest community of Photography (which I will not mention) They included my post in their report and I realized that they had not voted for me. When I asked them they told me that they don't have to vote for me and to thank them for advertising me with their report. So their reports are not for curation, they are for posting.
When I asked them to remove me from the report they muted me in the community, leaving all my posts of years made in that community silenced.
The moderator now lives by posting reports from his personal account, when before he used to post good original content. I guess he got a better “crack the game”.
From there I post in another Photography community that although they don't have much voting power, if they do curation to add to their reports (not for “advertising”).
As far as I know they don't vote on all the posts in their compilations because they include so many there, that's at least a reason I vote those because they go over so many. Not all posts may be underrewarded but their report may not just be about finding underrewarded posts but a "best of" kind of thing.
the mute seems exaggerated and I don't agree with it, maybe there's more to it than just that? do you have a link?
anyway there's a lot more that goes into this than just picking up posts for curation, there's moderation of communities, checking for abuse/past history and overall user engagement etc, so I find it a bit reckless to say they're just trying to make rewards from your post when yours is highlighted and included in a post with 30 others there. This whole approach about reports to me now seems convoluted since you already had a bad experience from the beginning that may have fueled your judgement towards them for the worse.