Thanks for the analysis, important discussion to have. Your vote counts are accurate, so let us fill in the parts the numbers cannot show, starting with where this model came from.
Until the end of 2023 our votes carried no front-end weighting at all. On chain: June 2022, 5.0% median on Ecency posts and 6.0% on everything else. December 2022, 5.9% and 7.2%. Posts from other front-ends were getting larger votes than Ecency users. The weighting came in around the turn of 2024, a year after the January 2023 thread where you wrote "I'd be fine if for instance ecency were to ignore people who post on other front-ends". Ref. We disagreed with you then and said so: "Why this is better? People like to use other apps, why limit them". Ref. What we ended up with is between those two positions. Everyone still gets curated, posts published through Ecency get a larger vote. Today it is about 6% against 3%, so other front-ends now get smaller percentage. Curators do not set that weight, the bot applies it after they vote, which is why the numbers look so flat.
No vote is bought, sold or guaranteed. @ecency curates with 2.6M HP, 2.54M of it delegated by about 1,400 people, and every cent of curation it earns is returned to them daily, the full yield of the stake. We keep none of it. The DHF proposal pays 100 HBD a day, down from 396 and 300 in earlier years and it funds development, not votes.
None of this was hidden either. Our curation runs through a guest curator program anyone can join, two new people every month, and two of our curators are answering in this thread. That is the point of running it that way. If the multiplier itself is what you object to, say so plainly and we will discuss it in the open. We can do some other experiments as well and analyze...