I've gotten involved in other people's comments but I'd like to offer my own, a point no one has out right made.
Voting for what is quality, in your own subjective opinion, is the stated goal of the system. While you correctly point out that the curation system needs fixing, if you take the long view it is not helpful to vote purely indiscriminate of quality. Quality, attention and vibrancy are what will make or break this platform. This is one of the reasons I do not support vote selling. Focusing on the immediate rewards does not contribute to the value of your investment long term, or really even medium term.
I suspect that you must realize you have limited impact on the direction of things and so are going with the safe option of doing what works here. But as the whitepaper cautions, whales like you should be incentivized not on the immediate gains but the health of the platform, and your impact is many many times the impact of the average user, orders of magnitude larger. If you're not convinced it is to the health of the platform, are you just making hay? Because the sun is not shining on the price of Steem.
As the top commenter at the time of writing says, @talltim:
This is why Steemit is not what I thought it was. I thought it would mean curation and votes based on content, not lining pockets. [...]
I am of the view that code dictate user behaviour. If people can exploit the system it means there are holes, better fix them before the masses come rushing in.
That's right. I don't think my vote will really make a difference, sure I may help a few steemians and have good conscience doing so but to make a real change we need everyone to behave in the platform's best interest and this is only possible by creating the right incentives baked in the code.
I don't disagree that things should be improved, I've been long advancing ideas for improvement. The sad truth is that by vote selling I believe you are contributing negatively to the long term prospects. But if it's get significantly improved it's neither here nor there. Hopefully this discussion gets the ear of the bosses.
@abit is making 200 SBDs a week more in curation rewards, than @snowflake made selling his vote to @minnowbooster - this is great news for the platform imo!
They both have a lot of alts so the real take isn't clear, I wouldn't be confident @abit is making more, but could be
This is a valid point, @abit could be trailing himself and boosting rewards that way. I'll have to find some more data...
Thanks for the info and response :)