RE: The Curse And The Blessing of Steemit Auto-Voters!
Great topic. Actually this platform has in, my view, a huge problem with Automatisation.
At first point, if this platform wants to compete with other big social sites, we need to interact with each other out of social reasons, not business related.
Second Point is the fact, that upvotes somehow declare the quality of a post. Personally, i check posts with a lot more upvotes and a good header often than others with a lower count. Can't relate to other steemians, but it might be the same with them.
An other point with auto upvotes, which i realized weeks ago, is the number of posts the author might provide. Let's say an author writes one big article, which you clearly want to honorate. Now this author realizes that he has some auto upvoters, why not splitting up the article in several parts, getting upvotes for each part.
Just my thoughts on that topic.
Well, that's why the most important part (when using auto voters) is to pick wisely the members you would put there. Meaning, you have to know the quality of the content they provide (through some previous times), their posting frequency and many other things.
Regarding the platform itself, I can't entirely agree with you as the platform was not created as some possible future replacement for Facebook, Twitter or similar social sites and accordingly it doesn't compete with them.
The goal was to gather quality content providers (bloggers) that would be more easily found and rewarded for their work than they would be otherwise, even if they are running their blog on own domain and being paid through some GoogleAdsense or similar advertisements displayed on their site, and above all being lost among billions of websites out there and without some serious investment unable to reach some higher place in Google Search.
Therefore and from my point of view, Steemit is more some kind of combination in between some blogger community site (e.g. like free WordPress or Blogger.com would be) and some social network site. Accordingly, the expected interaction would also be somewhere in between those two.
And the biggest difference from both is that it pays its members for their activity.
In the end, last but not least, instead searching for interesting content among Trending, Hot and Promoted or among some popular tags, consider trying in the New!
Although there would be without doubt a bunch of worthless (one-photo, one-video, a lot of copy/paste, plagiarism etc. articles), you may find some true not yet discovered gems there.
Personally, I'm trying to take a peek there as often as I can. 😉