There are a variety of ways to game network effects, pandering, and etc. I prefer not to detail here because those that know, already know, and those that don't include some that would if they did, in order to farm curation rewards. I generally agree that curation has been a disaster for the past eight years, and point to financialization of curation as a large reason for that trainwreck. @edicted suggested savings accounts as a means of enabling investors to attain to ROI without deranging curation some years ago, perhaps before Hive even began, and when HBD savings with interest of 20% advented I was greatly encouraged things would improve.

I don't have the chops to investigate how much the HBD savings accounts changed the situation, but I assume it has done something beneficial for curation by enabling an alternative way to benefit the platform from stake without requiring investors to game curation to attain ROI. Ideally folks would upvote content per their biases and promote their principles and subjective preferences for creators and posts that would appear in trending, rather than seeking to maximize ROI with curation rewards, which would make trending a better reflection of Hive society to folks searching for content from outside the platform.

Our content is our marketing, after all. This is one of the reasons that Splinterlands has been such a relative success for Hive. However, while gaming is a massive draw, social networking has become the largest global market financial sector IRL in ~10 years, if you consider PC hardware and phones part of it (which I do). Hive has potential to surf that tsunami of financial growth, if we could only fine tune the code a bit to enable investors to attain to good returns without deranging curation, and end the free for all of taxation by any and all of any content or creator on a whim, by restricting DV's to spam, scams, and plagiarism.

Eventually someone will get it right. Steem was the first on that scene back in 2016, but the weakness of pure plutocracy caused it to fail and impelled the creation of Hive back in 2020, and now there are numerous competitors in the market. I want it to be Hive that gets it right first.