Been spending quite a lot of time and brain power trying to make sense of a situation that somehow either keeps getting misunderstood or at this point is getting misunderstood on purpose, I think. Either way, wanted to bring some attention to this particular case and yet again post about curation on Hive. Let me start off by saying that curation is definitely not easy, while the word has been overused and means a ton of different things due to this chain, I'm mostly referring to the manual concept of it and the one that's meant to reward quality content, engagement and activity and in general things you feel bring value to the platform without overdoing it. As you can tell by that comment, the lines can get blurry easily and quickly and often times most of it is generally accepted and people don't start nitpicking too much unless it goes overboard a lot. It's quite a subjective thing in general, similar like quality or art is subjective, so can curation be and the line where it pushes some stakeholders to want to intervene while others maybe would have done so as well if downvotes weren't such a pain in the ass for everyone involved most of the time.
That said, I'm not an expert at curation and neither is my curation project, while we do strive to improve and I believe have done so over the past many years of running, there will always be something slightly wrong with it or unfair based on who's looking and what reasons they're looking at it for. My own curation isn't perfect neither, some days it can be quite lazy browsing through my feed barely even reading the full posts or checking out all the pictures/video content, other times it can be more thorough even going so far as going outside of my feed to check on random communities or if I'm feeling extra daring check the recent "all" posts from all communities and non-communities.
One of the big things that swept this chain many years ago when it switched to the linear curation curve that we have now again was the so called "bid bots". Linear curve means that based on how much HP you have and at what percentage your voting power is, you'll always give the same vote no matter how many others have voted before. At the same time downvoting thing would cost upvote mana, meaning those who wanted to downvote things would end up losing curation reward and thus APR compared to everyone else except the author and curators of the post they downvoted. Bid bots basically turned the 50% curation rewards and 50% author rewards on its head, those who weren't selling their votes would quickly come to regret it because their neighbor who was was earning substaintially more rewards than them. A simple example of this would be that I'd send you 5 Hive and you'd give me a vote which after payout would result in 5.5 hive, i.e. 0.5 hive profit, the upvoter would get half of those rewards as curation rewards but also keep the 5 hive, effectively getting up to 90% returns rather than the 50% the blockchain rules stated. So you can imagine that two similarsized stakeholders, one was earning 8.5% APR on his curation while the other was earning almost double that.
What did that do, well, it removed curation or the basis of curating content based on effort, quality, activity and consumption from the equation and instead gave votes to whoever paid for it. Good authors had to also start paying for it because every day more and more stake would set itself up to sell their votes rather than give them out "for free". In the meantime you also had your vote trading cliques that didn't care much for selling votes because they were already quite comfortably trading votes with other similar-sized stakeholders. This vote-trading also kind of defeats the purpose of curation and the 50/50 rules because while your daily voting power is spread out over at least 10 votes, if you trade your vote with 9 other users it meant that you were pretty much giving your 10 daily votes to your 1 daily post. This also removed any users without stake from the equation of ever receiving votes from this stake as they were busy trading votes with each other and potentially even buying votes on top of it. Close to no "free upvotes", i.e. curation was occurring at that time.
While things did change after a while and I'm not going to go into what happened then here as this is already getting a bit unnecessary long without me even having started discussing the case I wanted to discuss, let's instead get into this other form of "vote-trading" or "buying votes".
Delegation in exchange for votes.
I guess this one is a lot more like vote-trading rather than buying votes, although I am seeing quite a few projects try both of them and unfortunately get quite far as well. Here's some of the examples of how this works and why it's not good for the ecosystem.
You delegate a certain amount of HP to another account
Imagine you have 10 other accounts at your disposal and 100k HP, if you delegate 10k to each of the oher accounts and post once per day and leave 9 comments but you never use the same account to upvote yourself and instead have the other 10 accounts you've delegated to upvote your posts and comments, it's not selfvoting, right? Well, it still is, it even is if you're not the one personally doing it in a way.
You delegate a certain amount of HP to another account and get layer 2 tokens in exchange for your delegation
The other scheme I've seen lately that has been growing in amount of accounts/projects doing it is where they receive tokens in exchange for their delegations and with those tokens trigger the account to give them a hive upvote on their post. Similarly to votetrading this also in a way means you're using apprixmately 100% of your daily upvote mana to upvote your one post thus not leaving any mana for other users which defeats curation.
These are pretty much the "worst case" examples, then there's milder versions of it, some of them even you and me can particularly be a part of even if you don't mean to. For instance there's some stakeholders that automatically upvote whatever I post, while I appreciate that and try not to abuse it by shitposting or forcing myself to post twice daily, it would be even more wrong if I spent all of my voting power back on their posts. I do spend some of it on some of them because I genuinely read what they create and many of them who do upvote me I'm sure have other motives to do so than just wanting to support my posts or journey on Hive, but if I acted upon it with self-interest it wouldn't be right.
As an example, let's take the 
A recent case which I had an issue with was as follows, the curator spent quite a bit of the daily voting mana to not just make sure the posts of those who delegate get upvoted but since they didn't post that often he'd go out of his way to give them higher returns through voting up their comments. This was quite a special case, for one the delegators didn't even seem to be expecting any returns as the delegations they had sent were meant to support a community that curator runs and thus support the users posting there. Instead it was the curator that insisted these delegators get rewarded more because they were delegating to him which in turn meant he received higher curation rewards.
Not only does this take away voting power that could've been used to others posting in that community, since that's his focus to curate, but it generates this unfairness where he gets more rewards while the delegators barely lose out on having delegated their stake out. Let's compare it to 
To put it another way, as a user and stakeholder on hive, your post rewards aren't guaranteed, one could even go as far as to say your curation rewards aren't guaranteed but that's a way more unique case than post rewards. For instance, if you're constantly posting plagiarised or AI created content, the community is most likely going to downvote that sooner or later which means that your pending post rewards will be removed. If all you had voted that week was also similar content that gets downvoted, that means that your curation rewards of the votes that had landed on such posts are gone as well.
There's easy solutions to this if you feel you're unsure of how to vote or if you don't wanna risk voting on content that may get downvoted. You can follow a trail, meaning you can copy the votes of another user, one with a track record of not voting on things that get downvoted, i.e. curator. Or you can delegate your HP out to projects that either return them in a certain way minus a certain fee or return them in the form of a layer 2 token instead by either issuing out new tokens or buying up tokens with your Hive curation rewards, or lastlty they won't return anything and assume you donated/sponsored that hive power for their activity.
So, your curation rewards if you want to optimize them will net you about 8.5% APR by voting on content that doesn't get downvoted, but in the same go, your post rewards can be quite a lot more randomized. Post rewards should not be a fixed APR % and votes landing on your content shouldn't come with contracts and predetermined deals you may have done in exchange for your own votes. Why? Because it defeats the purpose of curation. Think about it, when you vote on posts, you either vote because A, you like the content, B, you think it is of high quality, C, you appreciate the effort and time this author has put into creating this content, D, you really like this author, E, you don't have a lot of time but sitting at 100% voting power means you're losing future returns so you just cast the vote and don't think much about it, etc. There can be many reasons to vote for posts and most of them are okay as long the intentions weren't to maximize your own post rewards in a direct/blind way like oblivious vote-trading.
Don't get me wrong, hivepower and votingpower are definite tools to garner attention and in return get votes back on your content, I don't think anyone can deny that and while there's not that much value in attention right now since the userbase here is quite small, things may surely change over time. This is the same reason that bid bots remained profitable in the past, there were barely any users, those posting and using them were only looking for that 5-10% profit cause they knew consumption didn't really exist for marketing/ads. The same reason that leasing hivepower right now is only a little bit more expensive than the returns that hive power brings you over time resulting in people leasing HP mainly trading votes with others doing the same so they can through the 50% of post rewards come out profitable after the cost of leasing and the middlemen fees.
While hivepower and your votes definitely can bring you more returns on your posts over time that way is a lot more genuine than the way some people do it when they're trying to cut corners.
Anyway, this post got pretty long and as you can maybe tell this is quite a difficult subject as it covers quite a lot of ground and different examples and angles of how people go about doing things right and potentially wrong. I may have to start a series around this going through each and every case in detail while trying to imagine all possible examples of its usage I can think of, but for now I think I'm going to end it here and maybe some newcomers I've noticed appearing in my comments may learn something new or at least what to avoid when continuing on their Hive journey.
Thanks for reading.
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