No, I see your point - I was just taking exception to the particular verbiage of select "few". I don't think by any definition of the word "few" it is accurate. BTW thanks for taking the time to respond intelligently, articulately, and without devolving into name calling/insulting. I personally am not in favor of silencing dissenting opinions, it is why I gave your initial comment my 100% upvote (not that my upvote is huge or anything) and raised its visibility in the comment thread. I would much rather have a conversation and try to understand opposing viewpoints, and I appreciate that you were willing to indulge me in that.

I am 100% in favor of what you are saying about whales being excluded from the pool. You may not be aware, but the initial goal of Curie was to have phased itself out of existence by now. The idea was to help diversify the reward pool, redistribute wealth (SP) to smaller accounts, and once Curie was not as relevant to shutter operations. The funny thing is that while Curie's influence on the reward pool has indeed been steadily shrinking, it is not because the wealth is better distributed now than it used to be. Quite the opposite. The rise of bid bots / vote selling is serving to further concentrate the wealth in the pockets of the largest accounts, dominating an ever increasing % of the vote pool, and in my own opinion, making Curie more indispensable than ever.

One thing I should mention - I know you have been on platform for a while, and typically when I run into people who share this view of Curie they have been on platform for a while. I bring this up because your point about the Curie vote being designed to exclude you (and by extension, other authors who share similar views) by intention used to have a much more solid basis in fact. Not sure if you are aware, but back in September of last year Curie diversified operations considerably by reserving a large chunk of its total vote power to support interest and regional specific "sub-communities", which do NOT operate by the core Curie guidelines. The reason there is such vote diversity as I highlighted in the first charts I shared, and the reason why Curie is now reaching a greater % of authors than its % influence on the reward pool, is precisely because of this. "Core" Curie operations, meaning the posts submitted by Curie curators for review by Curie reviewers, and which the Curie guidelines apply to, are actually now a very small % of the total outgoing vote. Each week the number of outgoing votes from this core operation is typically in the 100-150 vote range, while total outgoing votes is in the 1000-1200 range.

I am not going to pretend that there are no issues with the Curie supported sub-communities either, but the entire point of going this route was so Curie would reach a much more diverse set of authors that would never be reached by core Curie operations. We are in the middle of conducting an audit on all the supported Curie sub-communities and have uncovered some abuse of the vote follow, so again, not going to claim this is a perfect system. But given your core objections to Curie, hopefully you can see that this is a huge step in the direction you are wanting to see. These are much smaller votes, and are distributed much more broadly, and are not beholden to the Curie guidelines. The sub-community votes are cast by independent curation teams which are not Curie operators.

Anyway - thanks for humoring me and I appreciate the back and forth. You do good things for this platform and I appreciate it. Cheers - Carl