What is interesting, is I think this is a large portion of what this thread/conversation is about. Most people are probably upvoting simply because they expect it to pay out a lot, so they are jumping on the bandwagon to get high curation rewards. Hive account@dantheman himself seems to indicate that downvoting to reduce the payout is an acceptable thing in the current paradigm.

The real challenge is deciding what value each contribution has to the community. It is obviously subjective, and while some people might argue that this post does deserve $2,500, a lot of other people would disagree. As someone with significantly higher SP, the system is giving your subjective value judgement a lot more weight than say my subjective value judgement.

I think you should decide if you think the payout of a particular post is high/low in your opinion, and upvote/downvote based on that.