I think it will soon become of even less importance to the Steemian as we move to communities.
It may then be up to Steemit if they wish to present what remains to the world.
I think communities will find a way to disallow (external) bid-bot content to appear on their own trending pages, and may use their own 'community' bot to 'organise' the best content that suits their agenda.
However, there will still be an externally facing 'Trending', and if not, perhaps a worse scenario where low grade content is boosted to no-one, purely for the returns, as the round become less busy.
That's what this post was about :)
Nice post!
Talking about alt accounts, I've seen a lot of established users creating a second account in order to upvote themselves and increase their return.
It's easy to track them since they usually send the SBD of both accounts to the very same exchange address. Then they publish some good looking anti-selfishness posts via their main account in order to maintain their clean image.
That's actually quite bold - or should I say dumb?
I've stopped digging too deep into the blockchain data, since you always end up being very frustrated and disappointed.
The circle is very well protected. They can actually do whatever they want and it will never affect their reputation or return.
That's also why I'm posting 99% about surfing and other fun stuff - and not about Steem anymore...:-) Too many grey ones on my head, haha!
Sounds like a healthy sampling of both to me! :D
Yeah I can't help but dig, it's my nature and my previous line of work. I should post more about life, as I can certainly say the same about the greys!