How do people propose to solve it? I just see a lot of complaining and very confusing flagging going on. I don't even really understand what the problem is supposed to be and no one ever explains it. Are all bots bad? Or just when someone buys an upvote for content the bot creator doesn't think is good enough? How are new people meant to understand what to make of all this?
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If you looked back on the beginnings of Steem and compared it with today's situation you'd see that the whole culture of the platform has completely changed. The original vision of giving value back to those who create value has changed to give value to those how are able to pay for it. From a content and quality-oriented platform we've constantly evolved towards a purely profit-oriented platform, where profit means individual wealth and not common (community) wealth. Self-voting and excessive vote buying have become standard.
Now projects such as @curie and @communitycoin still support the original idea of promoting quality content and spreading rewards towards smaller accounts. Bid bots promise supporting small accounts while the only ones that effectively benefit from vote trading are those who sell their votes. At the same time, bid bot owners don't open and read content before upvoting it, so they have no effective control over their voting power and don't assume any responsibility when abusive content reaches trending positions thanks to their contribution. They rather rely on the community and services like steemcleaners to balance rewards if they mistakenly upvote abusive content. In my opinion everybody needs to assume responsibility for their votes, whether you manually curate or bots do it on your behalf.
From my understanding, in a tokenized environment attention is the most valuable currency. Putting it up for sale weakens its original value. Why spending hours in editing content if you can copy-paste it from the internet, boost it to the trending page and get full attention?
I'd love to see moving ourselves into the exact opposite direction, where attention needs to be earned through creativity, uniqueness and dedication and where value is given back to those who create value as it was originally defined by the founders.
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.
I personally see little to no value in the post by @flysky and though I do occasionally use vote bots I think this has gone overboard. The post by @aidasfg7 isn't too bad other than the cheapness of all the text placed with the images as if it were content pulled from somehwere else.
@surfermarly Well i think if the content is that bad,they will lose the people anyway again. Humans are individual so do you think everyone likes the same things?
So what do you think happens,if more people come to the platform if not the fact,that they bring their own "taste"/"style" with them and spread it. It's like with the spread and mutation of a language.If the speaking community is large,there will be dialects :D
To be honest:as long as i don't see "the joy of violence " et cetera here i am happy.
Excuse my english c:
Your English is perfect. I'm also not a native speaker, so no worries at all :-)
Of course taste is absolutely relative and subjective and untouchable. We were rather talking about excessive vote buying and its consequences in combination with abusive content. It seems that there is a trend to copy-paste content from the internet and then boost it to trending positions. The actual input from the author is very low then, while the output can be tremendous, just thinking about increasing repuation and followership.
My point is rather a different one: people that excessively buy votes, try to avoid engaging with the community and are just looking for quick money. When I joined Steem there was a completely different philosophy. Selfish behavior was not well seen. Today it seems to be the only way. That's what I was trying to voice here.
It's weird beging exposed in such way if your actual intention is getting back to a more community-driven culture...:-)
I can't wait to see the community feature installed. That may change the whole game and make engagement more valuable again.
Well in this case you are right.
But either the content is good or not...
And if it's not and they are avoiding their community...Do you think they will maintain?
But yeah.The bigger problem is the growth on the repututation.
Do i think right,that those things weaker the steemitpower (and the value of the dollar anyway...) of the others?
Don't see such things as a exposure,rather than the beginning of a nice "debate".Because in a debate you have the possibility to argue and make yourself understood.
Which is given in a good community c:
I guess it will be harder for vote trading services once communities are established. Not sure if you've heard about it. It's a new feature that will help to organize/group people according to their fields of interest.
Gerade in Deinen Blog gesehen: wir könnten wohl auch auf deutsch schreiben, aber dann versteht es keiner :-)
Aber gerade dann passiert doch das,was in den meisten sozialen Netzwerken durch die Algorithmen das Problem ist.
Du wirst in deiner kleinen Filterblase gefangen,weil die Seite dich so länger bei sich behält.
Zugegeben.Hier wahrscheinlich nicht in dem Ausmaß,da die anderen Netzwerke Werbung für dich schalten wollen.Aber du verstehst,was gemeint ist oder?
Das Problem hier ist mehr,dass die Plattform größer wird und somit immer mehr "Geschmäcker" sie für sich entdecken und es wäre ja zu schön,wenn jeder Mensch höflich und anständig wäre...Was ich damit sagen will ist,dass sich immer Jemand findet,der schlechte oder falsche (...Jedenfalls aus einer anderen Sicht,denn was ich mache wird aus meiner Sicht ja wohl Sinn ergeben :D...) Beweggründe hat...
Ich meine kannst du es nachvollziehen,wenn sich Jemand für seine Religion in die Luft sprengt obwohl Selbstmord in dieser verboten ist? -Die können datt irgendwie?
Aber bevor ich etw. mit "communitys" falsch verstehe... Kannst du mir einen Link dazu geben? c:
@qfilter is another to add to your list of projects promoting quality.
Hello @surfermarly good to see you here. I was thinking about this the other day about how the original content on SteemIt was all about quality .vs this pay-for-play type mentality. I suppose this was a bi-product of Promotion tab not working really. I was thinking things out as I run @moonbot , which is a subscription based upvote service ( not a bidbot upvote service) , and was thinking if everyone just got a bump on their posts, in general, they would be content on not having to pay to send their posts to Trend ,but more jump start there post. I know the bot wouldn't be able to service everyone ,but they could service people above a certain rep. A kind of built-in bot to the platform, or community driven/funded type bot ( maybe, we all can burn our SBD there ? ) . It would obviously do a larger upvote then mine and still allow that person to benefit from a jump start. A lot of people just use bid bots to gain followers even. AND just maybe, if it had some "trending" type meter icon function in it the bot can come revist it based on views and engagement around it and give it another bump. I'm just trying to thing outside the box on these issues these days. Have a nice day :)
edit:
tdlr; a reward based bot , based on true interaction from the community & maybe, a little jump start to their post.
Hey @steemitqa! Great you jumped in here. I guess one day we'll have all steemians together in this one blog post - awesome :-)
I think that's always the way to go.
Still I don't know if bots were really needed if you'd consider the power of social engagement. In all these bots yes/no discussions sometimes it seems as if we forget that we have a brain :-) I know that it was easier back in 2016 but it was actually not different. How long did you need to be seen within the network? I remember it was in my 5th months when my articles started to be recognized. Five months. I wonder how many invest five months of their time today? Most people are looking for quick solutions, but it takes time to build up something solid and grow sustainably. I still believe that - even we're more people now - social engagement beats paid promotion.
I will definitely check out your @moonbot, since I already like the name a lot :-) But now I'll go skiing (writing this from the Alps :-))
Have a great day, too!
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.