It has come to my attention that the account hive.curation is also participating in some sort of vote-trading/self-voting scheme. This time a bit different from the 50% beneficiary one we discussed recently but in general pretty similar.
Here's a link to one of their recent posts explaining how they work: @hive.curation/delegate-your-hp-and-get-20-times-upvote-daily-equivalent-apr-up-to-26-or-apr-16-return---day337-20210505t214254z
In another post they mentioned that the daily report, which is automated and they self-vote, has a risk of being downvoted at Hive, so they'll suspend it, but they still continued doing them.
I'm sure the reason for the downvotes was because others also noticed this scheme being unfair to proof of brain, the EIP and the general consensus of how posts should be rewarded on Hive. They also flaunt a 16% APR ROI which is pretty juicy but if you know how Hive works you can tell that's mainly only possible by front-running high earning posts automatically without so much doing curation. This is fine in it's own as the blockchain and rules have allowed it but will come to an end quite soon with the next hardfork.
The real problem here of course is the "get 20x vote of your delegated HP" making it pretty much worse than the usual votetrading circles on Hive.
Although votetrading is a bit more difficult to judge and I believe will become a bigger problem with linear curve to include also smaller accounts, I'm sure we'll try our best soon to prevent that as well or at least penalize it a bit once we have these other issues under control.
Back to the ironic name @hive.curation, they have a whitelist of the accounts they allow to get the 20x vote based on their delegation but that doesn't change the fact that these accounts are self-voting up to 20x by delegating to them. The usual vote-trading is to circumvent the convergent curve to cast votes on each other to hit the tax limit which in the end is practically self-voting 10x per day by just posting once as long as you have 9 other vote-traders in your circle automatically voting for your content.
Hive.curation takes advantage of many of the delegators not posting and being okay with the 16% returns they receive (which also stems from front-running that will pretty much go extinct soon). So what I propose is to throw some downvotes on these delegators that are receiving a 20x vote on their delegations on their posts to reduce both that vote and the returns of the hive.curation account.
This isn't proof of brain, this isn't in line with the EIP and how we want hive curation to work. It is even more important to set these ground rules before the linear curve so there won't be a "oh if they're doing it then I'm gonna do it as well"
thought process following the hardfork.
Before I take action I'd like to hear other people's opinions on this. Cheers.
PS. Not setting beneficiary to hbdstabilizer on this post cause if it's anything like the other one with 400 comments I'm probably going to spend way too much time on it, if not feel free to downvote, I might as well.
