I'm still not too sure about Curie. The account sends out large payments to its "workers." Some accounts receive hundreds of SP very frequently from the Curie account.
Last I checked, the account sent out a couple hundred grand over the course of the year. I encourage anyone interested to use SteemSQL or something to collect all transfers out of these types of accounts and sum them. You will get an idea of the users that are profiting the most.
Curie doesn't seem very selfless. That doesn't mean I don't think it is useful, it just is paying its workers quite a lot.
On top of being a high ranking Witness that doesn't share witness votes.
The whole point of paying curators is to give the entirety of Curie holdings back to the community, there is a large amount of infrastructure involved with operating Curie, and the main point is not to support self voting, nepotism and to maintain the highest level of integrity. We do not vote for witnesses as it stands, in order to maintain our integrity such that Curie is not accused of being bribed or otherwise for a witness vote, we do not support anything which is quid pro quo that could damage the reputation within the community. With the introduction of community votes, Curie has followed communities like SteemSTEM and has given 100% of curation rewards earned from the followed votes back to these individual communities. It seems like you've already made up your mind about Curie being selfish, however the fact is that we have dedicated ourselves to give back as much as we can to grow the Steem community with an amazing team of curators, reviewers and sub-communities all of which I am personally proud to be apart of.
Curie pays its contributors 100% of all revenues. Contributors are paid a lot precisely because Curie is selfless :) Other projects are businesses, they have founders and owners that need to make a profit, hence retain a cut and don't pay contributors as much.
Curie is a community project operated entirely by the community. Anyone can get into the project (in the past it used to be completely opened, but now requires recommendations for existing curators as that was unsustainable) and through quality curation make their way up the ranks to the ultimate goal of getting a direct follow from Curie, and a reviewer's privilege. It's all transparent, fleshed out and objective. E.g. Each post accepted earns 20 Steem. To gain a lucrative reviewer or direct follow, you need to maintain a Curation Score of 200 over 6 months. Some contributors earn a lot, because they do all that work. Anyone can replace these contributors and earn that much by doing a better job. This system has developed some of the best curators on Steem, and may continue to do so. It empowers the highest quality curators.
The project runs through community contributions. The top curators decide how it functions democratically, and it has been a unanimous decision to note vote for other witnesses, to be completely apolitical and unbiased. Some curators have suggested that we would get a lot more witness votes had we traded votes etc, but we still didn't. That should give you a sense for Curie's spirit. Absolutely driven towards meritocratic and quality curation, for the benefit of promising authors and the Steem community in general, with absolute integrity and no compromises whatsoever.
Of course, Curie can go down a different path if our community so desires, but as of now, this project has survived for fifteen months never asking a single penny or a vote follow or anything at all, from the community. It runs entirely through donations, curation (mostly), author and witness rewards.
PS: Any questions, feel free to join the #curie channel on Steemit.chat. Someone will be around to answer your questions.
I don't know about the primary, or inner circle of Curie folk but I am basically a Curie worker and I certianly don't get quite a lot. In fact, I'm excluded from curie payment. As a science curator, I get paid, but as you can tell by my wallet history, it ain't much, 50sbd a week, and some upvote rewards (but not by the curie train).
The ones we at steemSTEM give $100 to (using curie and steemstem together), are ones that we consider exceptional content. Most are given about $10-30. This is still for posts that are well referenced, original content, however.
But yeah your main point I can't so much comment on, I agree that it's not a problem per se, but if they're getting extraordinary payments, well, that's a shame but the curation work my teams doing has benefited supremely from curie's input so far, so I can't really complain!
Glad I'm not the only one that saw that. Lost my vote a long time ago.