Quality is inherent in a post, but subjectively evaluated. I can set my bot for example to vote for stuff that loosely fits my own quality ideals. It will be like me voting while operating at the brain capacity of a massive hangover, but it is not promotion, and the judgement is not irrespective of quality.

all bots have any intelligence does not mean that some bots do not have some amount. Central to his argument too was the fact that pay4vote often (maybe nearly always, I don't have the data) goes back to the person paying for the vote, so it is an indirect self vote, which is best understood as promotion. I know this is a controversial topic we could get lost in, but to bring it back to point, using a bot does not necessarily make it promotion which is your assertion.@denmarkguy made a good central point which I think you have failed to expand from just applying to pay4vote services to applying to all bots. That not

My apologies on not following the link, I saw it was an article I've already read with great interest several times, I didn't realize it was a comment you were linking to. I've read it now and I'm caught up.

However there is nothing there, and @netuoso is not even correct enough, it's shot down way easier than using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for a few months. Where it fails is "a mechanism on the post itself". What is this mechanism? How can it be a captcha, when posts are just text? So is it a link? If it is a link that goes to another site then that makes the blockchain dependent on that site to operate votes. And if people want to opt out / not use the captcha, do they still have to use a key? Do they just include it in the post? It is not implementable, never mind defeatible.

Making posts and comments less visible (they do not become invisible, even on steemit.com) is not censorship, it is deprioritizing them in the interface. It's not censorship to have to click again to reveal the contents of a post and it's images. If it were, then having to accept a terms and conditions page is censorship. It amounts to filtering of something which the community has decided is not valuable, literally not valued.

Side note but personally, and I've said this before, I think posts should be color coded instead of reduced in visibility, and that you'd be able to filter out posts that had low or negative rewards, but only by choice. It would be cool too because if you're the kind of person who likes to look out for posts which may have been down voted but that you might support, it would help you find them.

reduced visibility was the clincher, although it no doubt played a part, but when you are not getting rewards for your posts you sit up and take notice. Now, I know that it was largely the actions of a few whales here that flagged him so much, hence the quotes, but conversely it's largely by the actions of whales that some posts get highly rewarded. I've argued for improvements to this, as have you, so I'm just stating the facts here.So we note that reducing post visibility is the consequence of negative rewards, it's all about the rewards. steemit.com chooses (they don't have to) reduce visibility and filter posts with negative pending paying. In the case of @skeptic the causality was largely economic, it was the same for @noganoo. They found out that what they posted was not valued by the community. I don't believe the

They have to "self-censor", if you want to call it that, as it's the only way to be accepted by this community. A better way to think about it is them discovering what works here, what are people interested in discussing and what will they not tolerate. You can bet that @skeptic in particular is not censoring himself on other sites, if I remember correctly he went to another site with mind in the name and continued much as he had been here.

Thanks also for the discussion, as always.