Like I said, there are pros and cons. The fact that you can bid for user attention is part of the Steemit core mission, if I'm not mistaken. The fact that bid bots are not doing a great job at fulfilling this mission is also true.
Organic evolution will settle this, in my opinion.
I don't see how this can be enforced at the blockchain level, it's not something that witnesses can control in any way.
I agree with you partly, how I see is that "only" organic evolution has the ability to settle this up but that's an intuitive thought which even I share but there is no data or analysis backing that up.
Bidding for attention is not bad, but there is a massive difference between bidding for attention and bidding for money. The former ensures you get more eyeballs on what you want to promote, that's what fundamentally advertising means and Steemit has made a promote section for that but using bid bots is like trading, I guess upvote trading is what people call it. People don't care about the content, Plople don't care about if others read it, all you care about is the ROI, that is not what this platform is for. I agree some content goes in the trending section but that is rare.
The alarming things is the volume of delegation it polarizes, we are building a platform for Artists and creators. Working on in for 6 months and have recently launched the Alpha but it is difficult for us to get delegation and support genuine users because it's almost impossible for us to offer the ROI the bid bots offer. Any thoughts on this?
In my experience, building a community takes between 2 and 5 years. This time span increases each year, because the field is getting more and more crowded. Community building is painstakingly difficult and slow. Look at Steemit, it took two and a half years to have more than 100,000 users interacting constantly (I know the official number of accounts is over 1 mil, but I think only the active users are really relevant).
Looks like you got yourself into a long term project.
Yeah that's absolutely true, It is definitely a long-term thing and in end being able to build a community must be worth the pain 😅 Thanks for the reply :) If you have any time do check out www.1Ramp.io, we ahve released the Android App would love to get your feedback.
Just had a quick look, seems interesting. Good luck with it!
I think it can, in a way. Create a witness approved list of bots that are blacklisted from contributing to user-rep in any way. Without the rep boost, there shouldn't that much fear that bidbot users will come back to retaliate when regular users flag their posts because of disagreement with the projected payout. Maybe add self-upvotes and related-account (proxy/recovery links) votes to the equation of don't count toward reputation votes.
Then do one huge blockchain level rollback of raw rep points that shouldn't have been counted so all those poor content bidbot using accounts drop back to the thirty something rep they would have had without the bots.
That is: fix the reputation part in the blockchain and the community might grow the balls to self-regulate more. Might take some time for people to grow their balls, but with some backing blog posts from a few top witnesses, after such a blochchain HF action, I think the current inflated rep caused flag-phobia could be put in remission.
This is a consensus rule, so it must be enforced by a hardfork. Which means we would have to do a hardfork every time we add somebody on that list. Not feasible.
Couldn't you just have witnesses (and/or the account owner) cryptographically consent to additions to the list after the use of the list is added in a single HF?
Consensus doesn't work like this. It's a more complex question that atomically accept / reject changes. Also, involving witnesses in this thing could lead to competition - some of them may consider some bot legits, other not. It's opening Pandora's box.
No, you would definetely need consensus on the idea that bot votes shouldn't count towards reputation and that account holders should at least be able to do some kind of irreversable discretionary drop humanness operation, and that self votes and related (proxy/recovery link) accounts shouldn't count to rep either. The pandora's box part I think, would be limited to agreement that an account that didn't discretionarily drop its humanness should be on the list nevertheless. I could imagine that if someone were to make a hybrid bid-bot that in fact includes some form of owner curation (Ok, if the #1 bid is crap and the #2 bid is not, I'll upvote #2 instead), there might be some strive.