Then @ned was right and we need oracles to divine actual unique human users from bots and sock puppets. There are vote sellers on Hive today too. Should we ban upvotes? Perverting curation because some people are criminals isn't the solution. Ferreting out the criminals and flagging them into insolvency is. Is the solution to people taking steroids in sports to provide them to all contestants? That might even make sports more interesting to watch, as power lifters rip their own limbs off trying to push too hard.

Curation isn't the problem. Curation rewards are the problem. They financialize curation, allow profiteers to game it for financial returns, and this degrades the power of society to reward content per the subjective opinions of the voters. Curation rewards destroy curation by this mechanism, substituting financial interest in the curation rewards for the subjective evaluation of the content.

It's corruption. It destroys social media, just like Pfizer paying influencers to sing songs praising the jabs ruins music. There used to be an account on here, @sherlockholmes, that ferreted bot networks and that enabled people to flag them out of existence. He suddenly disappeared, probably because he ran into exactly such network run by oligarch(s) and was paid to quit. Some of these guys have tens of thousands of accounts. They spend a lot of time and money creating those accounts. They didn't just do it for shits and giggles. They did it to make money from them, and that's what they're doing with them, exactly as you said.

Curation rewards don't stop them. They make doing it more profitable to the criminals.

There's sound principles and there's corruption. Standing on sound principle allows society to prosper, enables folks to trust and rely on one another. Corruption prevents that, allows thieves and frauds to gain power over others and steal from them, even kill them and take their stuff.

That corruption is a big part of what has put Hive on life support by pushing hundreds of thousands of users off the platform. Unrestrained taxation is far worse, but corrupting content valuation reeks of unfairness, and that drives good people away.