While I want to preface this post that I absolutely don't have a lot of time to deal with this, I feel as though a lot of stake has concentrated into these vote selling schemes lately that someone should start getting in the way of it.
I'm of course mostly speaking as a curator in this case, and I can understand that a lot of authors are not aware of any wrong doing when delegating to such projects but they need to be made aware carefully to reconsider as it's not healthy behavior for our curation for a large amount of stake and thus inflation to end up this way.
If someone reading this has the time and potentially also some tools to properly do research on the most blatant vote selling schemes, I'd appreciate it if they'd get in touch with me to tackle this. For now I'll just be looking here and there whenever I have time and let the authors know why downvotes are occurring if I'm seeing excessive activity in this end.
I also realize not many may speak up about it or openly support as downvotes are a bit taboo and real shitty user experience for everyone involved, but if we don't at least adjust this activity downward a little we may see more and more stake concentrated towards these projects offering votes for delegations and/or layer 2 token holdings.
There's a lot of things that can be improved with curation, I'm not denying and have often spoken about excessive autovoting and authors who blatantly farm it once they get there, excessive vote trading between stakeholders and other forms of abuse. However to blatantly disregard curation in the form of openly voting users based on self-interest of the project and expect that to become the norm may very well become the downfall of curation and we'd end up like Steem's trending.
I fully expect most users participating in this to not like what they're hearing but it's no news that this form of voting is mainly based on greed from both parties involved that comes out at the cost of everyone else not participating in the scheme. People are going to play dumb, point fingers and most likely even retaliate in any way they can but that'll just reflect on them as people.
Again, this is not something I want to be doing, I hope others will back me up over time but enriching projects that have no utility or innovation and mainly cling to hive's layer 1 curation to prop up their token prices and increase curation rewards of delegations is not something we should expect hive to bear as it's only going to cause more and more hive continuing to be earned with low effort and tossed towards exchanges or useless/pointless layer two tokens.
Feel free to discuss but if I feel like you're just wasting mine and other readers time I'm not going to keep explaining it over and over.
For the projects that I've talked about this privately, I appreciate your co-operation and your promise to change things up and I hope that us together countering this bad activity will send more value your way for your projects that may bring/keep value on hive rather than what I've been mostly seeing lately.