There are some of issues I noticed with the current curation model and the response provided. Currently curators are incentivized to vote on posts that will "become popular" but these posts are not better quality content they simply have the predictability of receiving larger votes in the future due to big wallets or consistent bid bot purchases. Many of these top earning posts have a narrow window of larger curation earnings due to the undesirability of authors burning their large or paid for vote power during the initial 15 minutes. Most of the 100%+ curation earners are automatically voting with small amounts in less than 15 minutes on posts that will receive predictably larger votes in the future which has nothing to do with curating content and creates a mob mentality momentum for posts that will predictably land on trending/hot lists. I am curious to know how many actual accounts' (or better yet unique individuals) posts and votes have earned what percentage of curation. I think the number is very small and is mostly auto-bot voting on a small group of consistently overpaid authors within the initial 15 minutes.
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Yes, I think that this is the main approach used by the 100+ club. Those predictable votes can come from bid-bots, from dApps with high SP such as DTube / Utopian / Oracle-D, or just from users that consistently receive high upvotes.
I think that there is a second system which involves making a huge number of utterly tiny upvotes on comments that are statistically likely to receive upvotes, but I need to do more research on this.
It is possible to follow the first approach described above using a list of authors that consistently produce good content. But I would agree that this has nothing to do with the "content discovery" idea of curation.
I think that overall the current curation system is broken. This is why I suggest a "flat curation" system - one without incentives so people are free to upvote whatever content they like and are not influenced by gamification.
I agree, thanks for shedding light on this issue. If you want to look more into dust vote curation bandits check out these accounts:
jadabug
hdu
ezravandi
imisstheoldkanye
votes4minnows
delabo
cheneats
elviento
accelerator
penghuren
...and many others.
I think that some of these accounts follow the second curation system I describe above. I need to do more research on it. But at first glance I don't think that it does any particular harm to Steem.
I can hardly blame them for trying to maximize ROI with the current system. Once I noticed them doing this to my posts I created my own accounts to front-run them with slightly higher votes to take back the curation rewards. For example if I vote with 0.002 immediately before they vote with 0.000 or 0.001 it prevents them from taking so much in curation rewards. The problem is there is a limited amount of rewards and time to front-run a large payout post so the more people that do this the less chance a small account has to receive significant rewards by naturally curating without auto bot voting.