Some of you oldschoolers may still remember the EIP and all the changes it brought forth to our platform, of course some stakeholders preferred to just ignore it but after the hivefork it became even less of a problem and everyone came to an agreement to stop selling votes and curate. Now I'm not going to get into the curation and how that was evolved over time, there's also some new rules and changes being proposed for the upcoming HF so maybe better to focus on that later.
One thing I do want to bring up that I've noticed lately, though, is something that's in one way bringing back vote selling today already.
Just as a comparison, let's assume (as an example) 
"Hey everyone, we're worried that our Hivepower is too little to support all of you and the people posting into our community, in an effort to grow it and to reward you with more rewards, we'll be starting a new initiative where we're asking people to give us up to 50% of their post rewards, which we then would take and lease more HP with it to reward you more! Of course since you guys are the ones funding this we would focus on the curation on the people giving us more of their post rewards."
What does that sound like to you? Does it sound like curation or does it sound like vote selling covered by curation?
Well, another certain project on Hive is already doing this. The reason I decided to compare this with if another curation project would do it is because this project and its "leader" is already someone who has a lot of enemies on Hive and deservingly so. He's constantly abused the memo system by marketing his posts countless of times by spamming people with links and now he's back with another scheme.
The one thing he of course won't mention to you is that by doing things this way it will naturally even grow his own cut that he takes from the project. Even if that's not the case he's taking 50% more of author rewards while it goes through a middleman leasing project which also takes a cut itself along with more curation rewards just to offer delegators more returns which at the same time takes more power from the other curation projects who lease HP in other ways than dlease.
Anyway, thought I'd make it clear here first about what it is that he's doing, hear your thoughts and opinions on it and what you think about the scheme. Then we'll decide on how to take action towards it as I don't find this acceptable towards the EIP and at the same time authors and their rewards. Not to mention so close to the new hardfork and linear rewards I think it's not a great time to start allowing this kind of activity cause it'll be one step closer to bringing back bid bots and vote selling activity and ruin a lot of the things we've managed to build and repair over the last few years. It'd be a shame to nullify that and got back to looking like our corrupted twin chain.
Take a look at their current trending: /trending/hive-175254
Surprise surprise, all posts have 50% beneficiary going to their "fund", I haven't checked the data but I wouldn't be surprised that they would just skip posts without this kickback completely as greed knows no bounds.
Let me know your thoughts and if there's any info I've missed out from this scheme and you happen to be involved and know more I'd appreciate to know that too.