Ok so basically Steem gives incentive to upvote other people by giving out curation rewards. If I upvote you for $40 I'm going to receive $10 of that reward (25%) as a curation bonus. When you receive a curation reward Steem is basically telling you, "Thank you for bringing this valuable content to light."
Now, lets say I upvote you for that $40 and then, because I did that, multiple other whales upvoted you for a total of $400 more. Now there is $100 more in the curation pool, but how does that money get distributed? The accounts that upvoted first get more of the curation pool. Theoretically, I might take half of that curation for a total of $60 curation. This is even more money than my original $40 vote.
Curation tempts whales into engaging in a lottery of sorts. Whales who would otherwise be exploiting the system and only voting for themselves are now incentivized to vote on quality content that hasn't been voted on yet, in an attempt to make even more money.
If you buy votes, you are artificially manipulating the curation pool. You can buy votes early and give curation to yourself, or you can buy votes late and give it to the people that have already upvoted you. I've concluded that if you buy votes late and support your supporters, they have even more reason to support you because you're giving them extra curation money. This could lead to a snowball effect because you'll get more organic votes and the artificial votes will push your posts into the trending tab giving you even more visibility.
I hope this helps. Feel free to ask more questions.
Ok so basically Steem gives incentive to upvote other people by giving out curation rewards. If I upvote you for $40 I'm going to receive $10 of that reward (25%) as a curation bonus. When you receive a curation reward Steem is basically telling you, "Thank you for bringing this valuable content to light."
Now, lets say I upvote you for that $40 and then, because I did that, multiple other whales upvoted you for a total of $400 more. Now there is $100 more in the curation pool, but how does that money get distributed? The accounts that upvoted first get more of the curation pool. Theoretically, I might take half of that curation for a total of $60 curation. This is even more money than my original $40 vote.
Curation tempts whales into engaging in a lottery of sorts. Whales who would otherwise be exploiting the system and only voting for themselves are now incentivized to vote on quality content that hasn't been voted on yet, in an attempt to make even more money.
If you buy votes, you are artificially manipulating the curation pool. You can buy votes early and give curation to yourself, or you can buy votes late and give it to the people that have already upvoted you. I've concluded that if you buy votes late and support your supporters, they have even more reason to support you because you're giving them extra curation money. This could lead to a snowball effect because you'll get more organic votes and the artificial votes will push your posts into the trending tab giving you even more visibility.
I hope this helps. Feel free to ask more questions.
That´s clear, thanks for your long and detailed explanation :)