Are curation rewards part of the problem?

Are curation rewards part of the problem?

After watching the drama between a couple users unfold this past week, I have come to the opinion that curation rewards are a double edged sword; harming as much as helping to the platform. Curation rewards provide financial incentive to upvote a post and make it more popular in the hopes that others will follow and make the post even more valuable. The end result (dependent upon when you voted) is that you get paid a small percentage of the posts total earnings. While this is good in theory, does serve to get some authors noticed, it is also one of the most abused functionalities of the Steemit platform. This abuse manifests itself in a number of ways. Low quality users that primarily rob Youtube of content create bot armies that continually upvote their posts as a result they garner a small profit from the spam article they upvoted as well as the curation rewards that will eventually filter back down to their bots.

In many ways I see it as similar to the pump and dump scam found in the cryptocurrency market. A user creates a garbage post, uses bots to upvote (pump) it so it appears popular, regular users see it a post with a lot of votes and join in hoping to make curation rewards in event the post explodes. The post does mediocre at best, and the rewards are distributed (dumped) with the lions share going to the original author and his army of bots. The regular users that joined in get a penance of the rewards and essentially wasted their vote on a scam.

The other and more insidious way in which I think curation rewards hurt the platform is that they entice users to upvote content that they either disagree with or downright do not like based simply on the fact that it’s a guaranteed payday. For example take the posts by @berniesanders and @haejin regarding the great Steemit Feud of 2017. Both of these authors are consistently making $300 or more per post regardless of content. In fact many of the highest earning posts consist of nothing more than bitching about the other user. To that end I don’t particularly like either user and I think they have both acted in a transparent manner indicative of greed and crowd manipulation.

That aside I too find myself tempted to upvote their posts at the 30 minute mark out of sheer greed and to grab some SP as I know they will go up. I think that when you have a system in place that entices users to upvote based on greed regardless of content it needs some looking into.

Thoughts?