I can agree a TOS would be valuable, to you/the organization, when it's your TOS. I promise you, it was a tricky call. I'm still feeling my way around in the dark, trying to get a good handle on these new and improved curation tools.
It's my understanding the upvotes received were not organic. Those who upvoted did agree to vote blindly though due to a contractual agreement. They're earning curation rewards, so it's not like this post was selfish or something like that.
Did the Steemvoter service recently add some kind of a random voting order feature for trails or am I confusing that service with something else? When the subscription payment votes roll in, are they always in the same order? Do members of your organization vote first? I hope these questions are not coming across as hard pressed. I'm not trying to stir things up. I'm curious.
These posts are tricky because they're almost immune to downvotes, at least from those who subscribe to the service.
The votes you see are from our Steemvoter 1 freemium service. These votes don't have any order imposed on them but we don't actively randomize them either, which is something we can look at, even though we planned to discontinue development of sv1 to focus on sv2 which has timed and randomized vote capabilities.
As history has shown our posts are not immune to downvotes, but rather the services we provide and post about are liked by many users, so most accept that we deserve rewards for it. Should our post rewards get downvoted, that would mean that BuildTeam would have to charge more premium fees instead of a freemium model. We like to offer both options to give our users the choice, but we will also adapt in a situation where that is no longer possible.
Regarding the curation rewards, the best way to earn curation rewards is to frontrun our freemium guild. That way you are automatically on the front of the queue and our software will detect that and not issue a second vote. This way we reward users who are passionate about supporting us.
A random vote order could potentially turn into a nice bonus for those supporters, but play out like a daily lottery. That's a lot of SP following the first few votes. Could be another potential incentive to power up as well, leading to more powerful votes, more curation rewards, more bank for you folks. People like those little perks and having another small reason to power up doesn't hurt. So that's something to think about.
That wording makes me uncomfortable. It's like saying member 'X' must put up with an inorganic post posing as something popular on the trending page, or everyone else pays a price.
It's your responsibility to create something appealing to lower the odds of receiving downvotes, so your customers can stay happy.
It wouldn't be fair to those curating and using downvotes as they see fit if you closed up shop and told hundreds of customers, "It's the fault of a few people who used downvotes."
That would create unnecessary animosity in a worst-case scenario.
In the post above I see a lot of rules and you're expecting to see quality. You can, too. ;)
I'm not saying the post above is shoddy. Not trying to test your patience either. I want to see people succeed here.