One important question to ask is: who, and on what basis decides whether a post is "over- rewarded" ?
Take a look at steemworld.org. You see that for this post, the "author payout" is ~131.82USD
Now if you look at the Steemium comment under this post, it says:
"126.23$ has been spent to promote this content using Steemium."
That makes a net payout to the author (me) of about 5 USD
Do you consider that to be "over rewarded" ?
On what basis, how do you reckon my post (implicitly, the time spent to research and write it) should be valued ?
The fact you paid someone to upvote you is not my concern, nor am I obligated to consider the profitability of your private transaction when viewing its rewards taken from the pool in proportion to similar posts. I feel like we are going around in circles now. The fact I don't want to wade through bought and paid for shit while searching for organically curated content reflects in my actions of returning proportionality of rewards through downvoting as the actual blockchain was designed.
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That is "zero sum thinking".
Please allow me to invite you to reconsider the implicit idea you seem to harbor about yourself that you understand how economy works.
Do you have a reason that makes you believe you can argue economy? I mean, there's no shame in not being very proficient in all the areas, you are certainly a very good network and security consultant but would you say you are as good in networking as in, say, law ? Unlikely. What about economics ? Just as unlikely I dare say.
The "reward pool" is an illusion. The "Steem" token doesn't have implicit value. The value is harnessed at the interface with the rest of the world, with the fiat based economy.
Looking at the the proportionality of rewards (denominated in steem) between different posts is akin to trying to learn how to ride a bicycle by focusing intently on the circular movement of a spinning wheel (rather than getting in the saddle and pedaling) ...
How would you laugh at me if I came to you and I started arguing some "too clever by half" stuff in the networking domain like, for instance "that network is on /22 and it should be on /24" or something I'm actually quite incompetent at?
You get too worked up about stuff you think it's straightforward and you understand. Believe, me, there is a real discipline called "economics", no one is born proficient into it.
Sorry I don't mean to offend you but you look at too narrow a picture, at the wrong indicators
Oh look, you're patronizing me again. We are done.
5 minutes on LinkedIn, turns out you aren't an economist either, but another IT guy. Who would have thought? Hypocrite.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sorincristescu/
In some cases I am willing to forgo that downvote with a discussion when I feel the situation warrants it as in this particular instance.
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Here's just one partial illustration to my argument about focusing on the wrong indicators (the fairness of sharing a worthless cake called "the reward pool").
Does our discussion have value ? I reckon it has - it allows me to learn about you, to hear and think through your arguments and come up with some answers (for what they are worth). It allows you to do something similar. We both learn something.
Well, if I had not used the bidbots to reach trending, this valuable conversation would simply not have happened. We would have not generated the associated value.
The steem in the reward pool is an illusion to get people to interact with each other and produce valuable content and learn. There lays the real value, all the rest is just illusion. In that sense, the bid bots, associated to the "trneding", are a good mechanism.
That being said, taking a step back, I think ranking posts in "trending" by the payout is a really bad idea. Post quality should not be assessed by how much rewards they gather. But I can't change that. Since I have to live with it, then the real goal is to generate valuable interactions within the rules of the game.
In other words, it's not the bidbots that are bad, is the "payout means quality" implicit logic of "trending" which is the original bad idea.