The whole curation rewards system on paper is great. Getting compensated for spending your valuable time reading and judging an article is an amazing concept. But I have a strong feeling that more and more people seem to be on Steemit just to get the curation rewards. Which technically would also be fine was it not for a few things. Maybe you can already see the first issue in the image below.
All four articles, of which I displayed the bar you will find at the end of each article, where 'Trending Articles'. These are basically the highest paid articles which have been posted in the last few days. In all these four articles you can notice that the amount of (up-)votes is higher then the amount of views (277 vs 112, 460 vs 219, 401 vs 185 and 620 vs 205). This means that around 60-70% of the people that up-voted any of these four articles didn't even open the article. It's obvious that without opening the article (a view) you cant read it and therefore the actual value of the article can't be judged. However, the system does allow you to do so and will reward you for it. Please note that I specifically searched for 4 articles where this was the case and although it took less then a minute, there are plenty of articles that have more views then up-votes.
As an author that just posted something it's nice that people massively up-vote your post and the amount of money that the authors will make on these articles shown is amazing so I don't think they would complain, I wouldn't. However, valuable information is corrupted as possibly only 100 people actually read it and from those 100 people only 2 actually up-voted the article. The other 275 up-votes might just come from people that follow high-earning authors and up-vote any post they post.
Proof for this can be found if you start following some of the authors that post trending articles. Within one minute of posting they will already have had 20 up-votes whilst the article might be a few pages long.
I therefore suggest people actually need to open the article and scroll down before they can up-vote it. You could possibly also block the up-voting option for the first few minutes. Let me know what you guys think!
