You should mention you wrote this article! I'll confirm I was interviewed for it. I'm glad to have helped in some way.

Gaming the system by bots is basically impossible to prevent, because captchas can't be implemented on a self-contained blockchain, or it would be ridiculously difficult. A reverse auction to 30 minutes after a post is made for curation rewards was introduced to give non-bots a chance to curate before bots voted, because an account, including bots, voting instantly for a post would sacrifice all of their curation rewards to the post's author.

As for your first post, you simply posted a link to the article. If you had even said "I wrote this" it might have been voted on more. Otherwise, aesthetics tend to matter on Steemit, as posts are shown with a thumbnail image of the first image used. This is the post that was more successful, it looks a lot nicer and includes some paragraphs for people to get a taste of the story. https://steemit.com/ethereum/@truthtaco/ethereum-reaches-unanimous-agreement-to-hardfork I'd say it included a paragraph too many but it was a pretty well formatted post, not just a title with the headline and a link. As a writer for a website, I'd like to hear what you think of this style of article previewing and linking.

Give Steemit a shot with your future articles. Unless CCN has an issue with it, post your entire articles here even! Just make sure to make it clear that you're the author. Thanks for checking out Steemit, I hope you continue to see what it's about.