Yes, the latter we can do something about, but that would require offering stakeholders an option to just receive their rewards without actually selling their votes or using it to vote content without curating ( vote circles, self voting through alt accounts and such ), that will just mess up the content discovery and diminish any true curation efforts, eventually forcing everyone to become a rather passive stakeholder if they wish to not feel utterly demoralised and just leave Steem as a whole.

We have a lot of people who would love to find great posts, I'm sure. And I can't be happy with Steem until real curation has an meaningful effect.

How things work now:

Top 20 trending is decided by who pays most to the passive stakeholders, these stakeholders aren't doing anything, yet they get rewards that match about 10 self votes a day + curation. This activity draws a lot of rewards from the reward pool, so the reward pool that is actually in use for manual curation is already diminished. This passive vote selling doesn't care about what gets seen on our trending, that the outsiders see first and judge the whole system by. And yes, it isn't pretty, but what can we expect when it's decided by who pays the most? So since this kind of activity is going on, even I with close to 6k Steem Power won't bother with curating. I don't have an effect, and if I do manually curate, I'm losing out on rewards and on effort needed.

This is a devious cycle that will lead to majority of people just opting to sell their votes, so a trending can be formed that nobody truly likes or is proud of. Quality content doesn't matter, and it will be obvious to anyone who isn't deluded by their stake in the system, hence hoping for better. I'd like to be proud of Steem, but self appointed "community leaders" with their feel good posts, who at the same time sell Steem's dignity to the highest bidder makes it harder every day.

How Steem could work:

Divide the reward pool by rule like it already is, between passive investors and active ones. Doing this we can actually save the curation process from the devastating effects that passive investors currently have on the system and actually make the work of active investors worth more, since they get to decide what gets rewarded and shown to everyone visiting Steem. They'd actually feel appreciated, who knows! Encouraging more curation by people who wish Steem to succeed long term. There are people who would like to do that job, even if it would pay a bit less, but now their work is muddled by passive voting, indifferent to quality of the posts. And it's a sad, sad state. Not sure how long I can take it, I might just take a hiatus and wait for SMT's and hope they can solve this issue.