It sounds pretty complicated but your conclusions are very easy to understand and I for one agree with them. As little as I am, I am going to stake my own position that I myself have reached on this question.
It would take a lot to convince me that payed-for bids like these have any merit at all in a system aiming to generate and host high quality content.
Is it not time for those who oppose the use of these bots to find some mechanism to verify accounts as 'bot-free'? It need not matter that some go ahead and use bots, but I think there are many people who would prefer not following such accounts, regardless of the merits of their content.
The irony of this conversation is that you saw this post when you did because I paid for a $5 upvote from @postpromoter an hour before.
And that's why people use the bidding bot services. It's not just about the profit, it's about the promotion, about getting your post onto more screens (where you attract potential followers).
As long as the content aggregators (steemit, mspsteem, busy, chainbb, utopian-io, esteem, zappl) use the default open source steemit code for post discovery, there will be a constant need and demand for post promotion services. That's why my approach is to call the post promotion services to a higher ethical standard - particularly the bidding bot owners, because they impose the greatest risks on their customers.
It's very easy to identify whether an account uses post promotion services or not. Since most services post comments when they upvote, you can look for the comments on the author's post. On this post already I have @seakraken, @postpromoter, @treeplanter, and @resteembot. These are all bots that do post promotion, but only @seakraken and @postpromoter are bidding bots.
You could also use SteemSQL or other analytics to establish metrics around it. I have a ranking table in Power BI that ranks all accounts by how many upvotes per post come from promotion services. My account is in the top 25. As I said in the post itself, I use them extensively (and mostly profitably), but this is not the typical experience. And in spite of that, (or maybe because of that?) I still can't get onto the radar of the people that most need to read and respond to this.
Once again, a very complicated exposition. I am nevertheless, unmoved from my position. Your argument is as supportable as those advanced by advertisers on other social media platforms who wish to confront users with their advertisements. They too believe that their life-changing products - content - is vital to the wellbeing of the public.
I would have prefered to see your content because I chose to see it by following you myself. If I had the option to have an 'ad-free' service here on steemit, I would pay $5 to have it. For the moment, I will curate as I do now: upvote for good content, engage for better content. Follow the best content generators.
Fully agree with this. In fact, I very rarely ever use the hot/trending tags, because I would rather follow people that I know to be fantastic curators.