I can't speak for the whole community just for myself, but I'd personally love to see a more content-driven and quality-oriented approach in the future.
As someone else who has been here long enough to watch the change in "culture" happen, it saddens me... but it doesn't surprise me. The "Human Greed Gene" is alive and well.
Maybe I am naive about how things work, but I am still trying to figure out why major stakeholders prefer schlepping bid bots with their SP, rather than leasing that SP to some top notch trusted HUMAN curators. They'd still get paid on their investment... but the result would be site improvement, rather than site decay.
Hey @denmarkguy! Good to see you here :-) Great statement/question to which I unfortunately don't have any solid response.
Bid bots are actually counterproductive to one of the fundamental principles of the Steem white paper, did you know that? The sweat equity principle according to that:
This paper was updated in August 2017, it's not that old actually. Still it sadly looks super antiquated if you compare it with reality.
Marly, I must confess that I mostly gave up on the White Paper because it seemed to deviate ever more and more from reality.
You're probably closer to understanding what is really going on at STINC since you went to Steemfest and probably got to talk to ned, sneak and crew. Interpreting from a distance, it always comes across as if they really are far more interested in selling technological infrastructure (including SMTs) than a social content platform.
But I don't know.
Sure! Ned Scott said in his last interviews:
From that day on I understood why nobody cares about the situation on steemit.com anymore :-) Not saying that this would be my approach, since I believe steemit.com is like Steem's no. 1 store sign, but at least I got where it all came from.