After what I saw 2 days ago I'm not certain that I believe that curation works. I accidentally came upon a rant post against a person misusing steemit for his own gain (I try to avoid these rant posts). The first reply was the person being ranted against. You can guess that his reply was an extreme howl about how his posts and replies were being flagged and how it wasn't going to work, he would prevail. He then upvoted his reply which was flagged. Even with the flag from the poster who had a 60-something reputation he still had a value of a nearly $25 payout on that one reply. I checked his stats. A generous 3/4 of his upvotes were for himself. I didn't have the stomach to see who his 'friends' were.

There's a lot of posters here on steemit who feel pretty good when we see our posts hit $20.