Update: Got word from @trevonjb that the vote was actually a @smartsteem sold vote and not a trail vote. Will be requesting that user be blacklisted. The trail account is @trevon. Apologies for the confusion.
I chanced upon a post by @moemanmoesly about a trail ran by @trevonjb and it really brought to mind something I think needs to be addressed.
What is the distinction between a voting trail and a curation trail?
I think people tend to think all trails are curation trails but I would disagree. I think to know this we need to dig deeper into what it means to curate and why. Notice the excerpt from the Steem Whitepaper below.
As I interpret this the defining aspect of curation would be whether there was a decision made as to whether or not a user contribution brings a social network value. Using this criteria as a litmus test, we can see that @trevonjb's use of the term "curation trail" is a misnomer due to the following:
recently Trevon implemented a new rule where upvotes will be based on the amount of SteemPower one has, so between 200 SP - 1000 SP will now be rewarded with a 1% upvote from the trail and >1000SP - 10,000 SP will get 10%, >10,000SP - 20,000SP will get 20% and anything above that will be 30%.
As you can see, the users that are following the trail will receive upvotes not based on their user contribution but rather the Steem Power they bring to the trail which seems contrary to the design of curation.
Also, this is not the first time I have noticed an issue with a voting trail. We had been dealing with abuse on accounts @tybodish and @jehray that seems to have what I would call a shit voting trail. From the votes I had observed on @trevonjb's, most the posts seemed legit with one notable exception.
I spent some time auditing votes and most are OK but then I came across this one.
I don't think $10 STU is appropriate for a link to a YT video and one sentence. I'm not sure how often this sort of thing happens but digging a bit deeper I found what appears to be a discrepancy.
@trevonjb voting on the post and 100% weight which triggered the trail but as you may note the account only has 78 SP with no withdrawals after the vote had been cast or within the proximate timeframe. I'm curious about what happened here but I suspect the trail followers may be a little more than that.
The requirement for trail votes was to have 200 SP and this rule was implemented last month so what do yall think is going on?
If you know someone on the voting trail, they may want to know that their voting power was used to upvote a low quality post with a 100% trail vote. It would have been an error and I will be performing a more comprehensive audit of the voting patterns to be sure it wasn't a one off error.
Tl;DR: Voting trail != curation trail + @trevonjb voting on a low quality user contribution that did not meet his trails criteria for an upvote.