@curangel doesn't front-run anything. It's actually the opposite of front-running, since new vote suggestions by curators are appended to a queue, and a vote only happens when the voting power of the account reaches 100%. Have a look at when @curangel votes on posts, and notice when those votes are happening in relation to the creation of that post. It's several hours afterward in most cases. Does this seem like milking behaviour to you?
There is a trail, yes. Every curation project has a trail of some sort. It's a way to entrust a project with your stake when you can't (or don't want to) curate as effectively yourself and you don't really care about maximising curation rewards. You can't even stop people from voting on a trail. Anyone can write a bot that follows votes it sees on the chain, and therefore, every account by definition has its own trail with at least 0 members.
I'd love to further discuss how you came to this conclusion that @curangel of all projects is milking. Certainly there are better examples of that?
I am tired of this discussion.
Just imagine you actually curated and voted on this platform for years and then you stumble upon a post titled like this.
I am not even talking about myself - I gave up on 'curation' a while ago.
This is just a cheap excuse for real curation and organic voting where popular material would automatically bubble to the top.
I understand your frustration. I'm also frustrated that curation is less organic than it should be. But it has gotten better from the era of bid bots. We have to consider that humans will be humans and we cannot go around expecting them to behave altruistically when behaving selfishly is strongly incentivised. That is an impossible dream, and we can either embrace that and try to iterate on the current system and build something a little bit better each time, approaching the world we would like to see... or we can give up like you say you did.
Which one is more productive?
I don't even understand what you think is particulary inorganic about @curangel's curation. It literally makes no sense. It's just like a big account doing its own human curation, except that there are several curators and not just one. Have you actually looked at the compilations and what is voted, or are you just damning the whole project because the votes come from a large account?
q morpheus: What if I told you ...
... that you are the one who gave up by embracing curangel.
I'd tell you that memes don't make myopic bullshit any less myopic.
So, who do you think benefits the most from curangel or ocd ?
Do independent curators, who vote the stuff they enjoy reading, benefit from curangel ?
Do influencers, who have a large audience (and seem to avoid Hive), benefit from curangel ?
Actually, yes.
One of the biggest issues with the curation rewards system as it is, is that there's hardly any time to vote manually after reading, which is really how it should work. This was already bad but got even worse when we moved from the 30-minute reverse-auction window down to 5 minutes.
However, because of the way @curangel votes posts with a several-hour delay on average, there is usually plenty of time for independent curators to vote content they were already going to vote before @curangel gets there. Assuming you understand how curation rewards work, you should recognise that this is actually very good for those independent curators who get their votes in first.