So I just finished reading @snowflake's post, Enter a Whale's Mind and I learned that the reason he no longer votes for posts he geniunely likes is because he can earn more SP by delegating his SP to various Vote Buying bots.

@snowflake writes:

I like these posts, I think they are undervalued a lot BUT I'm not going to upvote them because I earn way more selling my votes to a bot.
As an example, If I upvote the first post to $10 I would earn about 2 steem but if I sell my vote to a bot I would earn about 6 steem, that's 3 times more.

And as you read further along, you realize that he wrote it in order to wake us up the solution he provided... He wrote it in an inflammatory style to get us to see what's going on and his solution. I got a bit worked up, and have had a chance to see clearly why he wrote it.

So, there it is people. It's safe to say that Steem's reward mechanism is mostly broken, or wait, are the mega whales broken inside? Which is it?

MONEY CANNOT REPLACE INTEGRITY

It comes down to this:

I could lose all my money at any time, but I could rebuild my wealth if my integrity is intact.

If I lose my reputation and my money, I'm fucked.

So, I operate from the vantage of integrity and I am constantly asking myself these questions:

Is what I am doing building up my reputation?

Is this the best way of utilizing my energy?

How many people can I affect if I do this or this?

How can I influence the most amount of people?

How can I bring about a revolution of the way the world operates?

How can I help 3 people today, right now?

How can I use my skills to make some people's lives less shitty?

I am not going to lie. I want the value of my Steem investment to increase. But I see the value of it increasing by creating a site that is actually valuable.

What is valuable to humans?

Being recognized, rewarded, acknowledged, respected and held in high esteem. I think that maybe the issue is that two things are broken.....

I guess if the reward mechanisms were changed, so that whales would not have the option to make 6 Steem back from a full upvote, then @snowflake would have just voted for those 3 posts that he thought deserved upvotes........

My question to those three people: how did you feel when you read the reason why you're not going to get upvotes from a whale?

Ugh. I had not intended to write a post....if you're a whale, let's have a discussion, to see if you are being incentivized in the same way as @snowflake....is this how Steem is now operating?

I had no clue that this was possible...

Moral of the story: I would have to earn at least the same amount that the bot earns to upvote quality content that I actually like. ( which is about 50-60% of the post's value). I also think it's fair to say that changing curation ratio from 50/50 to 25/75 was a bad idea..

Why don't we switch back to 50/50 rewards, with curators receiving half again?