Vote trading (effectively self-voting) is the most braindead move, yet it is currently the move with the highest rewards on Steem. With the same amount of SP, even the best curation works will go nowhere close to the rewards acquired from trading votes. No sane investor will be okay in buying and holding SP with such an imbalance, where content-agnostic activities that work against the platform dominate actual content/curation activities by a large margin.

There's nothing wrong with trading votes, but a good economy will be impossible without aligned incentives on desirable behaviour. We just need to tweak the code so that curating (directly / indirectly through curation services) earns just about as much as vote trading.

Here's a thought experiment:-

1. Every vote is money on Steem. Imagine that every vote we give out, we get back 0% of it. It'd be safe to assume that no curation will happen. Because if I curate, I earn exactly nothing while the other guy who's not even curating gets everything.

2. Now if we get 100% of our votes back for every vote we give out, we can say that curation will at least happen much more often because there's no opportunity cost between any kind of voting behaviour. But there's absolutely no incentive for content creators to do anything at all since it all goes back to the voter. So it's actually the same as scenario (1) above. The effect is symmetrical.

3. Today in Steem we get about 25% max (average about 13%) of our votes back for every vote we give out, while self-voting or vote trading all the time can bring us back 100% of our votes (or more). So naturally, vote trading /self-voting is the dominating force on the network, quite close to scenario (1).

4. Now if we get about 75% of our votes back for every vote we give out? Certainly an improved situation compared to (2). Again, we can assume symmetrical effect so it's the same situation as (3).

5. We can expect scenario (3) and (4) to collapse into scenarios similar to (1) and (2) over time as the profitability gap is too huge between voting behaviours.

6. So now we're onto the balancing point, what if we get about 50% of our votes back for every vote we give out? Sure one could still self-vote / vote-trading away to get back 100% of their votes, but this middle-point would actually encourage more curation and one may even be able to get more than 50% back by curating well. The point is for folks to vote out more whenever they come across good content instead of just saving up to take it all back. There's also the cost of building a social network that perhaps many are willing to take between getting back 50% (or more) vs 100%. We've suggested tweaks that could make this possible, but so far a lot of the investors are playing mental gymnastics and don't think it's an urgent problem that can be solved. Maybe because by playing the game as it is now, they can easily use Steem's inflation to pay themselves as well. So why change? In any case, we've already proposed the changes in our posts past couple of months.