All the same, what people do with the vote power that they purchased when they bought STEEM and powered it up is their business.
Also, after HF21 the bidbots might be suffering, but the circle jerking is alive and well. Now, the "digging through new" strategy is unwise, because curators seeking best ROI will go with posts that have already gotten to the $10 range in order to avoid penalties on curation rewards.
No, it's not because the reward pool is common.
It is being dealt with.
There's a bit to unpack in that. The early upvoting penalty is linear but the benefits of front running are non-linear. Usually, the sweet spot is around four minutes when it comes to upvoting posts that are predictably highly rewarded. But sometimes even that can yield surprisingly low curation rewards if there are too many people trying to front run each other. It's precisely then when looking for less popular content makes sense.
Any curator who waits for a post to already have $10 on it is wasting money. I know a thing or to about curation reward maximization.
The very best case is finding something at least five minutes old that a lot of combined stake will upvote upon seeing it and having the opportunity to upvote it first. The only problem with that is that it takes some time to do. But the question is whether we want this platform to succeed or not. To work properly, Proof-of-Brain (decentralized stake-based curation) takes a bit of community spirit and effort to be as successful as possible.
Bingo. In your opinion do the currrent top witnesses and the Steemit,Inc team understand economics enough to make this thing successful? I had thought they did but the changes they pushed from HF 21 (mainly the EIP) seem to be against that. The first second and third priority should all be about creating demand for SP, and everything else should be a distant second. By the way, I have seen a couple of your other responses concerning the steem economics and I am just replying to all of those here. :)