The longer I'm here, the more I'm starting to think that the paid voting bots are a form of arbitrage that arises from an imbalance in the incentive system.

I have long advocated for each author to be able to set their own author/curation reward ratio on a per-post basis. It just doesn't make sense that an inexperienced author and an experienced top-performer would give out the same percentage to their curators. With adjustable curation ratios, newer authors could compete by giving some of their rewards to their voters.

Because that capability does not exist, maybe paid voting bots have arrived to arbitrage the gap.