How do you know posts are or aren't being read and what do you think would fix it?
Suppose for instance the upvotes come from delegated Steem Power and not just one whale? Is this going to make a difference if the people who delegate their voting power have favorite bloggers?
In other words, if some people have favorite bloggers, then those favorites will be voted by some people, and you would like a way to change this?
You mention that whales should lose some power but we don't know where the voting power comes from unless we track the blockchain. Also voting power can be delegated which makes it quite complicated. Finally it would be like we are telling people how they have to vote which could bias curation in favor of true spammers, or content flooders, who are new but who don't actually produce high quality content.
So if it were implemented that all curation must put some percentage of it's vote to new posters, this would be perfectly fine but I don't think this would solve the problem. Also if the quality of new posters is not encouraged (and by the economics it's currently not), then the content isn't going to get any better just because new posters are creating it.
The people who signed up for automated voting probably aren't reading them. It's supposed to be their favorite bloggers but I am going to bet their favorites are all high rep accounts. I manually vote my faves and it seems like having it done automatically kind of removes incentive to read it.
Probably isn't definitely. We simply do not know whether they are a team manually reading the posts or partially automated where they read the posts after the fact, or fully automated where they never read the posts. In general it's going to be hard to scale curation to a level where curators have time to read every post UNLESS the posts are shorter.
So again it favors short concise posting because it takes less time to read. Some people complain about posts being too short, and if the posts are longer then of course curators will tend to read the long posts from the established posters. I don't have any good solution which would make the system perfect but I appreciate the discussion so problems can be noted.
Is there any thing bloggers can do about this?
I believe I've seen automatic voting in progress. I started to identify and follow people who had a consistent history of always making $40 and above on their posts, no matter how little work went into them. Then watched. One would post a story, and then immediately they started receiving 5-10 votes. People obviously aren't reading the articles. Nu human being can read that fast. And I doubt that people are staring at their feeds just waiting for these people to post.
I'm a software developer, so I read dev-related threads on Steemit. There are quite a number of posts over there teaching people how to code up software that polls Steemit for new posts, scans the author's names, and then automatically upvotes if the name is in the bot's preferred writer list. That's not curation. That's a rubber stamp. In a way, it's a type of fraud.
How do you know they don't read the posts later? I myself sometimes vote up posts from bloggers I like and read their posts later that day (after I've written my own posts). Nothing is wrong with that by itself.
I think there is something wrong with voting before reading an article. And it shows why we have a false economy on Steemit. You're voting because it's easy, free money. What if every vote actually costs you money, to be deducted from your Steem wallet? Would you be so willing to throw around votes? That would be like going into the grocery store and blindly throwing things into your cart, telling yourself you'll figure out later whether or not you actually need all that stuff.
And then you get home and realize that it's food items you would never even consider eating.