Yeah, I remember those early autovoters... and I remember thinking "There goes the neighborhood!"
It works fine as long as just highly engaged manual curators use them as a back-up, and truly know who they are voting for... but for most, they have turned out to be a way to cast fractional "dust" votes for about 500 people... whose posts (as you suggest) they never actually READ.
Exactly!! And it takes the social out of the the social part. I feel sometimes that the social aspect is being forgotten about in the price panic when solutions are being sought out. For me quite simply, if it's not a social enough network it won't attract users.
I have noticed the rise of the dustvoters more so lately, there is virtually no return on curation the way they are doing it, it's mental!!
The emphasis to growth seems to have always been focused on developing new technologies, rather than trying to grow the user base properly , in my opinion.
The RC system is indicative of where the focus is not . (growing users).
Penalizing users for posting and communicating is beyond any 'customer centric' logic that I've ever come across....
I know, rc's were quite the boo-boo. It just ended up seeming like trying to force people to buy sp to interact.
People want millions of users, they want Steem to go to the moon but it won't if your every day Joe can't join and post shit that they like.
...and then you get some people saying things like 'if they cant afford it'....or...'maybe it's not for them'.... the mind boggles.
Agreed entirely! Everybody mistakenly seems to think the panacea here is sheer numbers... and it is NOT.
I wrote a piece (or maybe I just wrote a draft... I forget) about two YouTubers i know... one has 1.2 million subscribers, and the other under 100,000. And yet, the guy with less than 1/10th the number of subscribers gets about 20X more views per video... because he built his subscriber base around actual human social connections, over a really long time.
And don't get me started on the "resource credits" fiasco...
..just to get you started on the RC's...lol
I cannot see for the life of me, how this place will ever grow without changing the system.
....I used an account I hadn't touched for while, a couple of weeks back ( 18 steem in it, I think).
I made one post upvoted 3 or 4 times, and made a few comments - like3 or 4 - and that was it - I was done!
I had to wait until next day - and then I could only do a few comments...bizarre system to attract users.
'Join steemit, the social media platform - and then we'll penalize you for being social!'
lol