You can't reliably get $8 from curation. The reliable amount you'd get is going to be about 50% of the value of your vote, less than a self vote.
Sure you can. You just gotta vote on the right posts.
https://steemworld.org/@aicurator
Selfish in this context is people who are aiming to maximize the amount of stake they get from the system as opposed to acting in a way to build the network and make it more valuable as a whole. Essentially farming your votes.
So you're saying that when somebody has let's say 50 Steempower that person should rather work on increasing the value of Steem instead of trying to get more Steem?
That person would have the same ROI when STEEM goes from 1$ to 10$ as if he'd go from 50 Steempower to 500 Steempower. Only that the latter is much easier to accomplish aka. it's actually something the person can influence.
Then not everyone can do it. The best curators have to take curation rewards from other voters to achieve high returns. There's half as much money in total available for curation vs. for self voting, so it can only be used to motivate a very few. It's completely untenable that curation be overall more rewarding in general than self voting unless there is also major vote policing going on as well. In other words the only way to make self voting less attractive than curation is to bring down the returns on self voting, not increase curation.
Yes, I think if we were doing that collectively it would be extremely powerful and have much better returns than vote farming. We'd be turning Steem from a niche tech thing that a few people can milk for some extra money*, into something valuable for the world.
The way you calculate ROI here is a bit confused. Going from 50 SP to 500SP is not a return on investment. You don't put in 50 SP as an investment and get out 500SP, even 100% self voting unless you're talking many years. This actually kind of proves my point, the only way you get 10* and better returns is by the value of the coin going up.
You're right that it's hard for a small stakeholder to influence the price positively, though it could be easier to influence it negatively. By vote farming you make vote farming seem acceptable to those around you. It's easy to lower the standard of social acceptability and undermine norms, everyone has some power to influence that. Ultimately it's the larger stakeholders with the power to create and enforce norms in our system, so I don't expect it to happen from the bottom up.
* Note: the people who have been milking Steem in the last 10 months have most likely lost money if they bought early in the year. Even self voters are likely largely down.