Indeed, so bring curation rewards higher because more easy money for autovoting or vote selling, and those doing the real work to populate the site and chain with substance (or fluff in many cases) get less. Making an argument about reddit and saying authors could get 1%, or 0.01% of rewards, and they still would make more than reddit, is irrelevant as to why curators should get more and ignores the work being done. Reddit isn't a place for authors to begin with. It's an invalid argument and comparrison to make. Plus, it shows how little your value the work of authors, since 1% for authors is still more than redditors, as if that's just fine... lol.

I did take out a lot of STEEM. You know why? Because I was being flagged on nearly all my posts for months, with 75%-90%, sometimes 100% of rewards removed. That's why. Who would want to stay in a place where they are being treated like that? I didn't want to. Eventually the flagging stopped after 6 months of my leaving, so I came back. I also sold a bunch cheap when Dan left ($0.10), so I lost but others gained. I would have kept it all in Steem Power if the platform operated better or had ways to counter such abuses of power.

Anyone is allowed to sell their tokens. Anyone can powerdown. The shaming of powering down is really lame. You admonish those who sell because they aren't staking it. For someone to buy, soemone has to sell. You're only looking at trying to get STEEM to go up in value by creating scarcity from people not selling, by getting peope to power it up to get more curation rewards, and giving t hem more curation rewards relaative to authors who do the work of putting content on the site.

What's the point of having a token if selling it is looked on as a "bad" thing? LOL. It's meant to be used and sold. What's the point of money if it's all about hoarding it and not using it? That's how you cripple and sink a currency and an economy. You're plan for STEEM's economy sucks if you expect everyone to power it up and keep it there.

which is why bid-bots were introduced initially, so people could influence their own visibility. But well, who knew that some humans just wanted to abuse it and put bid-bots into a bad spotlight.

They've been used for the purpose of increasing rewards on a post since they began. It was about buying votes and buying rewards. I'll give you $5, you give me $5.50 (or whatever amount) back because you sell your vote instead of simply voting on content like things were done originally. That's the whole design of bid bots from the start. It was never started to promote visibility. That is only a side effect that occurs as a result of buying a lot of votes that few have as a primary reason to buy votes in the first place. Getting a $10-50 post from vote buying doen't get you anywhere significant in "visiblity". It's always been about buying votes to get more rewards. Keep telling yourself "bidbots are for visiblity, it helps the community and platform" if that comforts you, but bid bots have always been a blight on Steem and visiblity was never the reason they were created or used by people. It was always about getting more rewards by buying votes, not earnin them.

Few buy votes simply for visiblity (probably no one). Want to test that out? Allow a bidbot to take vote buying and then give the author no rewards for the upvote, like only for declined payout posts or something. Then see how many people you will get to buy votes. Not that many, because it's all about rewards first for the majority, and visibility is secondary, an after thought because of how the main front end site is constructed to show the Trending page by default which is based on the $ value of posts. Change that default sorting mechanism, and you change how "visibility" works. Would people stop using bidbots then? No. because the main reason has always been about getting rewards, not visibility.

There was already a place for peopel to pay to promote their posts, it's the Promoted section. If the main Steemit page was Promoted, I wonder if you would see less people use bidbots for the Trending page. Probably not that many, and things would go on the same way.