Let's be consistent here.

"...you are not actually curating anything but voting his content regardless of quality for profit, which is what I define as selfish pool raping."

This is buying votes.

I, like everyone else, like money (cue a clip from Idiocracy). An obvious means of acquiring money is buying upvotes. However, as I value other things more highly than money, such as integrity, truth, justice, and the American Way (which may not even exist any more), and despite the platform clearly being designed to support vote-buying, I have remained unable to participate in vote-buying, pandering, or collusion.

These schemes are all quite evident on Steemit, and often openly, and even passionately, promoted on Steemit, and the popularity (and profitability) of @randowhale, #MSP, curation trails, and etc., are unabated. Other mechanisms designed to extract maximum value from the rewards pool, such as curation timing through pre-arranged posting of content by authors that consistently trend, botnets, and sock-puppets, are less openly undertaken, and even widely denigrated.

All of those various mechanisms share one feature, and that is they are not designed to reward exceptional content, but simply methods to extract rewards.

I deeply appreciate your bringing @mindhunter's cryptic vote-buying scheme to my attention, as I, like @mammasitta, was a follower before this, and now I have rectified the situation.

However, I'd like to point out that it is the weighting of VP by SP that not only encourages vote-buying and the like, but practically enforces it on the fiscally responsible, at least those that consider emuneration more important than other matters.

Steemit is being forked as we speak, with the intent of weighting VP by reputation, rather than financial holdings alone. While Calibrae is the first fork of Steemit I am aware of, I am certain it will not be the last.

The concept of enabling the users of a social media platform to benefit financially from the value of the platform they participate in creating won't end with Steemit, nor with Calibrae, and eventually, if I understand markets, a platform that equitably rewards participants based on their contributions to the value of the platform, rather than their ability to leverage their assets to mine the platform for profit, will arise.

That platform could be Steemit, and I like Steemit, and want it to be 'the one'. However, based on my conversations with those witnesses and 'players' that I have been able to access on Steemit, I do not expect the weighting of VP by SP to change in order to demonetize mining the rewards pool.

So, I do not see you flagging @randowhale nor #MSP supported content, and there is virtually no difference between botnets and @mindhunter's scheme with @snowflake with those services - except @mindhunter and the botnets try to conceal their schemes, and #MSP is a community support mechanism rather than a solitary profiteer.

Unless there are other differences I have not been able to grasp. This is entirely possible, and I have often noted that I have missed subtleties that turned out to be important regarding various issues. Perhaps this is one of those issues, and you are about to enlighten me.

Frankly, I dearly hope so!