Bots don't have to predict anything. When you have thousands of them, they can all vote on all content, so one of them will be successful. And since they're free and easy to create, there's no risk to having so many bots. This makes increasing the curation rewards work in the bots' favor.

Removing self-votes also hurts bots because (with the new linear rewards), a self-vote becomes worthless and the value of curating is already lower, so the effort may not be worth the reward.

Let's have a serious discussion for a second. What value does "finding good content" actually provide to anyone? It's a great gimmick to get people to join a platform: "Get paid without having to write anything!", but for longevity, what value does it truly provide? I'm OK with keeping curation at 25% for now, but honestly, I don't think the "curation" rewards should be even that high.