Investors actually. In this case @snowflake is the investor, who did't have time to spend looking for good content to vote on, but wanted to vote and increase his investment. (from my understanding of his comment above)
Many investors are also authors/curators, but some don't want to or can't participate much personally, I guess.
I think authors and curators are aligned in the way they can achieve rewards, but they are not necessarily aligned with investors. As @lexiconical mentioned traders would be included with investors, which I hadn't thought of, but investors who are casual users were more what I was thinking.
So, since the "needs" of these two groups seem to be different, I was questioning how to create a more symbiotic way. Don't know if that really cleared anything up.
Ah, you had mentioned investors, and I understood them to be one group. I did not understand that creators/curators was the other group.
Thanks for clarifying!
Edit: well, now that I understand, I should make an effort to answer =p sorta obligated lol
The white paper intends that investors, those with substantial holdings of SP, are expected to curate, and thus the curation reward is intended to be motivation for that purpose. @andybets recently posted, just as @lexiconical above has, that curation rewards need to be larger.
I argued against it, but perhaps I am better understanding now why that might help.
Clearly, to date, curation rewards have proved insufficient for those with substantial SP to preclude their self-votes, and other rewards mining schema.
Perhaps @andybets and @lexiconical are right. I still reckon that weighting VP by SP is the root cause of the issue, as it delivers more 'freedom of speech' to those with more money, just like the Citizens United vs. FEC decision did - and CU was reckoned the end of free speech in America by some.
I feel that those people interested in dialogue on the platform can be rewarded without encouraging gaming the system by those more interested in money better by equal vote weight, or better yet, by weighting VP with reputation.
This removes most of the incentives to use SP to mine the rewards pool for profits, which in turn degrades the quality of the content and discourse on Steemit. Some have argued that this would remove the incentive to hold SP (just Steem but locked up for 13 weeks), and I am not sure they are wrong.
However, a strong social media platform that rewards it's users in Steem is a GREAT incentive to buy and HODL Steem, as the potential capital gains from such a platform being successful are practially incalculable.
Were Steem to reach $4k, equal to BTC, then at the recent price point of $1 for Steem as an entry point, investors would see 400,000% capital gains (Re-Edit: I suck at math). That is far more than can ever be attained by self-votes or scams, and frankly, Steem is a better crypto, with orders of magnitude better transactions/second, no transaction fees, and no mining and wasting of electricity, amongst other benefits over BTC.
IBM, GM, and other blue chips will never grow and offer investors gains like that. Risk is inherent in investment, even in blue chips. It did not stop the various cryptos from gaining currency (super pun intended).
Thanks for the reply, I didn't understand that investors were supposed to be curators. I think I'm allergic to white paper reading, besides, who reads the directions before they have to? lol
Curious, do you have an opinion as to whether this would be viewed differently if @mindhunter were consistently putting out quality, meaty content?
Were the comments that had been upvoted substantial, no one would ever have found out he was buying the votes.
That would have precluded anyone viewing the issue at all, so yes, very much different.
@mindhunter has produced good content, and I was a follower of his - until @transisto caused this whole kerfluffle to fall into the light. @jerrybanfield has substantially contributed more information, and his personal comparison is quite illuminating.
The white paper has been known to cause those trying to read it to begin yearning for death about half way through (srsly, according to @everittdmickey), although I didn't find it hard to understand. I did just skip the math (it took me three tries and two confirmations to calculate the capital gains percentage I included above in my head. I am not the strongest mathematician you will encounter in your life), but, for the most part it is pretty easy to understand, and very informative.
I have no doubt you will profit thereby.