Greetings. I've discovered Operation Clean Trending after I noticed downvotes from @heimindanger and @nikokafka on my post Mississippi's best hiking: backpacking in Noxubee Hills. The Clean Trending utility correctly identified my use of voting bots, and my post is still featured prominently by the utility:
If you look at my post, I suspect you will consider it high quality content that brings value to the Steem ecosystem, especially since it provides unique content on a niche topic that has the potential to yield search engine traffic from users who will want to engage via comments (i.e. new users). Perhaps, it sounds like you'll disagree with the amount of pending payout, currently at 119.66 SBD + 66.70 SP. Now that's a fair point, but I'd say that my profit is much lower, once you take into account the 38.190 STEEM + 99.095 SBD I paid to bots.
In my case, and I suspect in the future as the platform evolves, vote buying is essentially advertising. Now were there greater demand to advertise, votes would be purchased at a greater loss. I think it would be better for the ecosystem for vote purchasing to have an immediate ROI of around -40% (I used bots that cap the ROI at -10%). Should the platform grow in popularity, I think we may see more advertisers willing to take larger losses. At this point, vote buying could be a source of monetary inflow into the system, that enhances the value for existing vested users.
Anyways, I applaud you for taking to time and trying to do something about low quality content and reward manipulation. Given the current lack of rewards for downvoting, it's really an altruistic act. Operation Clean Trending is definitely a bold and innovative concept, and in an odd way I'm glad to be an early victim of the service.
Personally, I think the solution would be for explorers to have a trending mode that ignored vote-bot votes... sort of like the ad-block I have activated on my browser.
Currently there is no blockchain-level indicator on votes for whether they're paid (i.e. advertisements) or not. Certain bots, such as @postpromotor, do however leave comments making their usage is more transparent. I would support a "paid vote" field on vote transactions in the blockchain.
However, given that the protocol doesn't have this feature yet, it's up to frontends to decide whether to filter paid votes. The Clean Trending utility shows that it's not hard to detect paid votes at this point in time. My fear is that your downvoting operation will push vote purchasing to use more stealth methods, potentially transacting in other currencies than STEEM or SBD. This will make it much more difficult for frontends to filter paid content.
In other words, why punish producers of high quality content who decide to advertise just because the primary frontend (steemit.com) uses a trending view that doesn't filter paid votes. I feel like an ad-free trending view would solve the problem best. And in the long term, the community should consider a protocol level flag for paid votes.
Two suggestions for https://steemwhales.com/clean-trending/ that would make it less prone to downvoting high-quality content are:
regarding 1. you can simply click on trending. That's the problem about it.
Maybe you should look up what an advertisement is.
Hint: it sells you a product.
What was dhimmel selling you?
You might want to learn to distinguish the difference between promotion and advertising.
This is really about a monopoly (Steemit whales) kicking out the little guys like any other big corporation, they are protecting their interests. How else do you think this self appointed gestapo account manages to get $200-$700 for his crappy posts? It's a whale club, they vote among themselves and won't let the small fish play. The only thing you can do is power down and let these scammers fall on their own weight. I can't wait to see the prosecutions!