RE: From Writer to Whale Groupie? - Steemit from a content creator perspective 1
Yes, that's how the mechanism is intended to work, and that's how it should work in principle.
The problem I see is that the white paper does not try to estimate the time it takes on average for a new quality author to "bubble up" and be noticed and recognised. Yes, it is possible, but what if it takes, on average, two years of constant high quality posting?
The good author will take his/her writing to another platform much sooner. And even if s/he does stick to Steemit, it means that an awful lot of high quality content (and effort) is essentially wasted.
To cut a long story short: the time in which a good new author "bubbles up" needs to be estimated (I presume the existing data should allow this kind of stats?). And if it is too long, certain paramters in the Steemit mechanism need to be tweaked.
Very true. That's why I think they are constantly changing and trying new things. If delegated SP voting can be made to work it should accelerate the process. I totally understand what you are saying though. If I had the computing know how I would put myself forward as a witness with the pledge that I would only manually curate content and try to look for new gems.
For manual curation, it might be helpful to have a different kind of bot: not a "whale bot" as described recently by @dantheman but rather a bot that prefilters content for your manual attention.
As it stands, the signal-to-noise ratio and the volume of the raw feed of new content is such that manual handling is getting tricky unless one can devote oneself to it almost full-time. It could be useful for a "bot" to filter out e.g. simple reposts (without editorial additions) of content from elsewhere on the net, carelessly written filler pieces that just randomly scratch the surface of some well-known issue, thinly-veiled advertising etc.
Interesting question to what extent such pre-filtering could be automated.