Except they aren't because gambling on comments instead of blog posts is only done by a math retard, because comments (except maybe in rare circumstances) never can get the same voting potential as blog posts.

> Remember, early votes are worth lot more than late votes. Most blog posts you encounter are already heavily voted

I was referring to seeking out posts to vote early versus betting on comments which don't even receive an upvote 50% of the time. I haven't done the precise computation, but I can't imagine it ever pays to focus on curation rewards from comments because they most often receive 0 votes and those which have more than 1 vote are rare and even rarer are ones upvoted by whale. The odds for comments have to orders-of-magnitude worse than seeking out blogs.

@anonymint Wouldn't you receive a higher amount of curation from voting on a comment with $100 and being an early voter, than on a blog post that receives thousands of dollars when you have relatively little steem power. 

I see the value of both, but curation for minnows is very rarely more than $.001 so it is important for them to make themselves known as one who makes valuable comments and blog posts before than can really dive into curation.

 It is my belief that users should vote on content they like, and not just gamble on an article without reading it in hopes that it will make a lot of money regardless of how well it was done.

That's not an accusation to anyone, as everyone's vote can be used as they wish, but I think the more steem power you earn, the more you see that what you vote on can influence the entire platform of steemit and steer the ship in a way to benefit the maximum amount of users.

That's a shame. Because I like to use my votes as "approval" rather than "investment". But I'm not making anything on curating anyway so why bother trying make money curating? Better just to use it to show approval.

@jonno-katz if you aren't making anything from curation (and this is the case if your SP is small, say <1000), then you might as well do exactly what you are doing. Vote for purposes of approval to increases rewards authors you think should be rewarded more and exert a small influence on the type of content you want to see. It seems to me you are doing it exactly right.

@anonymint your comment is oversimplified. Remember, early votes are worth lot more than late votes. Most blog posts you encounter are already heavily voted, and late votes on even posts with high rewards are still virtually (if not literally) worthless. Most comment posts have 0-1 votes. Opportunity is not always at the location with the brightest spotlight on it.

@smooth I agree with @timcliff. You are trying to fix a  disease by ingesting more of the parasite. Pouring more of the wrong to try to make it right.

Conflicts are a sign of a system that is not designed to be harmonious. I am entirely against your propensity (when given the role to do so) to want to top-down manage discussions and forums. I am ENTP. Seems you might have some J in there?

There will be blowback from judging. Remember Matthew 7. Instead let's figure out a way for every coterie to have their own rankings and preferences. One-size-fits-all are always power vacuums that we must fight over.

@timcliff All those upvotes (assuming the voters had positive reputation which is usually the case) increased the reputation. The later downvote reduce the reputation, reversing the effect of the upvotes. As long as the downvotes aren't extreme and overwhelming (which usually only happens in the case of serious abuse), reputation will usually be only slightly affected or even increase a little if the payout is merely reduced and not driven all the way to zero and beyond (which would be a waste of vote power by the downvoters).

The new reputation system makes it even harder to do what you are suggesting. Let's say someone writes an 'average' post, and a ton of people upvote it because it is trending and they want to get a good curation bonus. Then a person with high SP comes along and decides it is too high because everyone was colluding. It wasn't a bad post or anything - it is just overvalued. If they flag/downvote that person's post to lower the amount it gets paid, that person's reputation is affected too. Most likely the person who wrote the post didn't do anything intentionally wrong or bad to make the excessive upvotes happen. Yet their reputation score is penalized by the person who downvoted/flagged their content.

I have a good example for you. I came across @acassity spam posting a link to his content in a ton of posts. It was done in a way that was completely irrelevant and off-topic. I downvoted him, and he retaliated by going to my blog and downvoting posts of mine.