some thinking about this matter of vote reward games and how to fix it, I want to explain why they benefit certain parts of the community, but are of no benefit to the aim of improving quality of content. They primarily benefit whales. By voting on them, they create a more flat curve to their rewards, their ROI.

But it clutters up the trending page, and this interferes with the intended benefit of curation.

I have been saying for a long time a non vote power form of Steem Power would fix the distribution problem.

For every steem power, the network calculates a proportion of the new steem mined that the user has available to assign to author rewards and curator rewards.

What if you had a second thing like steem power, but instead of adding their total to the pool for dividing up rewards, and associated voting power, instead the holder receives all allocation of curation rewards steem power would provide, instead it is accumulated as interest, and the remainder, would be author rewards, remains available for payouts.

By reducing the amount of voting whales do, but paying them as though they did the voting, their big votes are taken out of the calculations and this will raise the value of the votes of smaller users who specialise in curation or are also creators of content.

There is a no-brainer decision for whales chasing curation rewards. Why vote if you can just get the curation rewards your steem power would give, while leaving the rest for payouts? You wouldn't. This eliminates the "King Whales" effect, or would greatly reduce it.

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We can't stop here! This is Whale country!