100% agree on this, I've done this test countless times to check what gets upvotes by curation groups and there seems to be a total neglect there. (I wrote about it over a year ago Link)
Imo what would help Hive is if there was a link between someone their own upvote value and the % of the author payout they get. If your upvote is worth 0.00$ only 20% or so of the author payout with 80% being burned. if 0.01$ is yuour own upvote, it gets bumped to 40%, 0.02$ to 50%, and so on exponentially in a fair way. All this without affecting the curation earnings. (the numbers are just pulled out of the air as an example and by no means are what it should be exactly)
Also KE ratio should include incoming Delegations, that should boost the demand on the rental market.
This would actually give an incentive for everyone that is posting here to hold some Hive Power and do some curation themselves while it allows curators to just vote on the best things without the need to be worried that what they give is just being dumped on the market like in so many cases now.
Anyway, to be fair, right now the author rewards are only a small part of the problem as the HBD overhang and converstions along with the DHF is what mainly has been butchering the Hive Price.
Regarding the post you made a year ago, I partly agree. There are members of the curation groups who use HIVE to pay for contests and giveaways, and in some cases, they have to withdraw it because it’s their salary for curating.
What I don’t understand, though, is why those same members of these curation groups constantly vote for extractors. If they’re paid to curate, they should be more careful about what they do.
“Anyway, to be fair, right now the author rewards are only a small part of the problem.” I doubt it’s a small part of the problem, because DHF accounts for 10% of inflation and the reward pool accounts for 65%.
So the way I see it, is that many of the 'curators' that 'work' for curation groups also only really care about getting some money out of it and operate in the most efficient way, similar as shitposters who just pump out content that without any potential earnings never would be there. So they look at specific communities or challenges and find some users who systematically make posts that look ok or meet the required number of words to be considered 'quality'. They eventually get to a list of users, completely neglecting KE and overall behavior and just upvote those all the time, as it makes it a very efficient way to 'curate' and get some earnings here.
To their defense (if this theory is remotely right), you can't really blame them because it's super hard and not fun to really plow through everything here in the hope to find some actual quality that is underrewarded.
It’s part of a curator’s job, especially when they’re paid to do it. I only understand it when users have little time to do it.
Thank you for your explanation; it’s clearer to me now. However, I think the largest portion of these “Conversions” is the HBD Stabilizer. In other words, a necessary expense.