I mean I hold some EDS tokens and I think I delegate a bit, but it's pretty small comparatively, my KE shows that.
Dunno what KE has to do with anything here.
Let me try break it down.
You delegate to them, let's say 2500 HP. You are one of 100 people delegating to them 2500 HP = 250,000HP in total.
The 100 people earn tokens for delegating as well.
Every day, they vote 10% on the 100 people delegating to them.
Every week they unstake the curation rewards the 100 people made possible and use it to send out dividends to holders of said token.
Without making it too complicated with buyers of tokens being included in the voting, voting strength being adjusted, etc, already if these 100 delegators are all constantly guaranteed the votes, and if all 100 are constantly posting once daily this means they're effectively getting a vote back in return for their delegation = self-vote on top of curation rewards for their delegation in terms of token holdings.
Basically everyone involved is getting guaranteed returns + some extra through votes, everyone not involved is not getting that little extra and only curation rewards.
The project is only voting for people involved in their scheme, the project is doing better in terms of rewards compared to another project not guaranteeing votes to delegators. The project is also ignoring everyone not delegating or holding/buying their token.
Like, dunno how many different ways to put this in, but votes shouldn't be guaranteed - they are in many cases, I'm someone often getting autovotes from the same people and I'm sure you and many others are too, but these votes aren't coming from our own stake and the autovoter isn't having extra voting power/delegation because of us. That's the big issue here.
I'm pretty sure one of the parts of the equation for KE has to do with how much of your stake you have delegated out. That's why I brought it up. So you are saying self voting would be okay? There are a lot of people who would argue with you on that. They would also effectively zero out accounts for doing it. I've always understood where you are coming from, I just think the barriers for people to be successful here are to vague and too unreasonable. Why can't we focus on fixing that?
If you mouse-over KE on peakd it explains that it's just a simple number that adds your author and curation rewards together and divides it based on your current stake. Delegations actually muddy the KE as you now have another account earning curation rewards in your favor and giving you liquid Hive instead which you can power up to "fake" a good KE rating.
I guess it was something else I saw that took into account HIVE delegated out. Maybe it was a bot that someone created. I could have swore it was part of that equation though.