RE: NewSteem Onslaught Continues as Vote Sellers Capitulate
The main unanswered question in this is "Why the hell would anyone buy Steem and Power up?" (and we are also still waiting for an answer on how converting AFIT into steem is different to converting something like SPORTS into steem by using those upvotes.)
The main selling point of #newsteem is to buy SP, take hours to browse through, let's be honest', mostly garbage content to upvote it hoping to get back some good curation rewards while it's more profitable and way more time-efficient to auto-upvote the ones you know will get a lot of upvotes in the first place. The ones on top also have the biggest free downvotes which directly increases the value of their own posts even more.
Don't get me wrong, I love what this blockchain can potentially do but the economic incentives are still completely broken probably even more than ever now.
Incorrect. When a lot of people start autovoting the same author, they undermine each other's curation rewards. The best curation rewards will be reaped by manually curating and finding the good stuff that is yet to be discovered by other curators. Auto-voting more efficient for sure, but not the most profit you can achieve with your stake.
It may not be more profitable to auto-upvote, but as @costanza says - it will be more time efficient. If you're talking about reward for effort then that will be the way to go for the big stakeholders and indeed it looks like it might be going that way.