RE: The Dangers of "Pay to Play", and a Possible Solution. (Also My Thoughts on Steemit Behavior)
If you ask me Steemit started off as a human curation platform to begin with; but after someone programmed the first vote bot, and released it into the wild so that whales could profit off it, that’s what completely changed the dynamic and made Steemit more of a pay to play situation. I guess the tricky part is coming up with a bullet proof plan to provide incentive to get people, or whales to start manually curating again. Automating the process would be the tricky part, and having faith in the curators, that they are doing their job, and not helping out their friends. I think the problem is streamlining a process that works. Once that can be done, I’m sure if the idea is good enough many whales might be interested in something like that. Just to benefit the platform. Unless of course the benefits of the bot rewards outrank the benefit of the curation scheme. Keep thinking about and jot down as many things as you can. Hell, maybe propose your idea to programmers. Or ask the inventors of one of the bots to invent a competing system that could promote manual curation. Interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing!
Sadly for auto upvotes bots, the money will always be better than a human curated system. In the prior the user is paying a premium for a guaranteed vote, so they get the payment and the curation bonus. But it does cause a lot of drama when rubbish gets to over paid. In the latter users are only charged a viewing fee with no guarantee of a vote, but those whom's Steem Power has been used get to sleep well at night knowing they are only rewarding quality. I'd like to believe that there are at least a few whales that are more concerned for the long term health of Steemit and the value of Steem, as apposed to maximum profits in the present, at the expense of steem's value in the future.