I know more people were getting paid to look away, in an attention economy, and that's doing it backwards.
Those people purchased "Visibility" and the more they paid people to look away, the less visibility they'd get, and they did that all to themselves. The people purchasing votes were offering others an incentive to NOT look at content, with every vote they purchased, and that behavior was marketed as 'visibility.' The more votes people bought, the more money people made for not being around here to consume the content. If you paid me to not come to your store and buy the merchandise, you would not be able to sell the merchandise, and slowly go bankrupt. How this basic business common sense flew over so many heads here has always baffled me.
One cannot purchase actual eyes no matter how hard they try. Just like commercials on television, many refused to look at posts with paid votes. The people purchasing the votes did not know that.
Now, more and more, people are being paid to look. That's what curation rewards are. People literally get paid to be entertained and that concept has enough potential to flip the entire entertainment industry on its head, yet that potential has not been realized yet because for some strange reason, people around here don't know about the billions generated by the entertainment industry, annually. They're sitting around waiting for investors and speculators instead of embracing the millions of people who sit on their asses all day consuming content online and spending money to do so, all while getting nothing in return.
If we're going to pay people, what they're being paid for needs to be beneficial to all involved.
You're right when you say many left when they realized there weren't enough curators. Thousands left. One cannot expect to feel successful performing in front of an empty venue every single day.
I've battled through everything here. Never purchased a vote. Curated manually 27568 times. That was a lot of content to consume, plus a few comment upvotes as well. I didn't mind doing things the honest way. I'll continue down that path.
I disagree with you're too little too late quip but I do know how frustrating this place can be at times.