RE: Steemit – We have a Problem
Many people are disappointed by bot curation...
Yes. I've written about this problem in the past - I think I mentioned it in my last post about this. The automated voting becomes more of a problem for manual curators as the automated trails grow longer. I'm seeing posts a few minutes old getting a quick 40-50 votes from a single trail. A few minutes later, the post can easily be over 150-200 votes, all from two or three voting trails. This is not only "lazy" curation, in my opinion, but it also skews what people are seeing as quality. As an added negative consequence, it causes manual curators to lose voting shares because of the sheer volume of automated votes coming in before them. It's discouraging for such curators, to say the least.
Just in the last couple of weeks, the bot trails have started doing this. Just prior to that, I was able to acquire better curation rewards by finding good content, even with a lower number of vests - prices of Steem being in the same general area as they are now. Currently, I have twice as much SP, but I'm struggling to get the same number of rewards. My votes are crowded out, so my choice is to either vote early before I read the posts - and lose shares of the curation as well because I'm voting before the 30-minute mark - or I come in behind the large bot trails and take the hit anyway.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think automated voting is the best way to go for a majority of users. Things like Streemian can be useful to an extent, but I think it has a net negative impact at a certain point. Steemvoter is another one that people like to use, but I don't think automatically upvoting someone's content without seeing it is how curating ought to be done.
There's a trade-off when you automate voting that's supposed to be based on subjective assessments of quality. I would like to see no automated voting, but I also know that this would severely cut down on voting overall. It seems to me that there are a lot of users that like being entirely absent from the platform for long periods of time, but still want to benefit from it. There isn't anything necessarily wrong with that from the standpoint of an investor, but it does have an effect on other users who remain on the site and regularly engage. Finding the right balance is no easy task.
I cannot agree more. Currently Steemit is dominated by two entities: whales and bots. The former (whales, including me) mostly decide payouts, and the latter (bots) has influences on voting counts (and some portion of payouts by like @wang). As a result, average users have no room to show their influences, until they become whales or bots. Many users already turned to be bots, at least partially. As majority of accounts became bot-driven, and the bots are more likely to follow whales (since it gives them more curation rewards with higher possibilities), the problem is getting worse now.
I am not totally against automated bots, by the way. It sometimes makes users life easier, especially when they want to be in favor of certain other people (e.g. within community vote, a huge fan-ship for celebrities). However, it shouldn't significantly influence payouts, which is a measurement of "perceived value from the community". Bots have no perception at the moment (I don't think AI tech hasn't reached to recognize contents' value from the perspective of a community), so bot-dominated system is not desirable now.
My position is to remove curation rewards. While it makes the system less gamific, people (not bots) still have motivations to be influential in the community and to be favorable towards others who give satisfaction for them.
A upvote system that considers the amout of followers (subscribers) to a pertiular blog, and not just to a pertiular post, should be considered. I think this will crate a far more stable, equitable and consistent reward distribution.
Just use your votes for people youactually like and don't stress the content thing. It's more about solidarity than financial rewards at this point anyways.