One of the nice things of Palnet is that the distribution of staked PAL is much more even than it is on Steem and that all the curating has to be done manually. Well, that's two things actually. As there are no bid bots on Palnet no one can buy his way into the trending page. All the posts that appear on the trending page are there because they genuinly interest a lot of people. Which is supposed to be an indication of quality.
While it is generally true there are no bid bots (yet) on Palnet, the bid bots on Steem however do have an influence on the distribution of the reward pool.
There are several initiatives on Steem that help the small accounts grow. Steem Basic Income is perhaps the most well known (or the largest). Another one I'm familiar with is Qurator, yet there are probably dozens of other initiatives. As a way of growing my account on Steemit I joined the Steem Basic Income initiative, as well as the Qurator project. Each time I create a post, I get an upvote from both Steem Basic Income and Qurator. While it is not much, not even one Steem per post, it does help grow my Steem account.
Another thing I did was join the vote selling programm of SmartSteem. This is probably generally frowned upon, yet it provided another trickle in Steem to help my account grow. The effect was not more than about 0.8 Steem a week. That's nothing to the larger accounts, it is something to me.
Yesterday I checked the SmartSteem dashboard again. Three votes sold, generating 0.04 Steem in total for me. When I checked the posts, I noticed they are all three posts on Palnet. And a vote on Steem is a vote on Palnet as well. Three 100% votes, that are 9 cents worth on Steem, are in my case 18 PAL on Palnet.
And the reverse is true as well. As Steem Basic Income and Qurator are both accounts that are active on Palnet as well, I guess that an upvote from both accounts express themselves in PAL-rewards as well. I can not see how much of the PAL-reward of a post comes from one individual voter, so I can not express the influence of SBI and Qurator on my posts on Palnet. That there is an influence however, is without question.
The mantra 'there are no bid bots on Palnet' is not entirely true. Wether or not this is a bad thing I don't know. As I like to curate manually on Palnet I ended my subscription to vote selling on SmartSteem. I lost three votes yesterday I could have spent on something I like, admire or just want to support. And that irritates me no end. It is just the consequence of the fact that a vote on Steem is a vote on Palnet as well, so it should not come as a surprise. Yet it did to me and I guess the same might be true for others.
So, if you like curating manually on Palnet, stop vote selling on Steem!