I agree with what @viraldrome has said. The main problems currently are that whale gives votes to each other predominantly, that the reward system incentivizes bahaviours like described here by @snowflake, and excessive delegation of voting power to bots. But I think that was not the point of your email. Back to your questions:
- Of course, 4 is already a a large number for providing quality posts.
- Shorter posts, if they have some value in themselves (I don´t like just referring to a link or just posting a video with one sentence only). But not all posters have the skills to condense information to krisp messages.
- 1 to 3
Now we have some progress. Originally before Hardfork 18 the prominent bloggers were doing around 4 posts a day of very high quality. The competition at the time was about quality and length of the post was encouraged by the limit of 4 top level posts per day. Today the average poster is posting a few sentences with a picture, or similar short posts.
So it seems you recommend shorter posts. Is there a limit to how many short posts a blogger should be allowed to post a day or is this unlimited? If it is unlimited then this encourages the blogger to post as many short high quality posts per day as they want. If each blogger can only make 1 post per day, can you show me an example of a successful blogger who makes 1 post per day and is earning well?
I would not recommend more than 4. If 5 would be the average, and you follow lets say 100 people, your feed would contain 500 new posts per day or more which is a number I could not even screen through - but my opinion only. The fact that they are shorter doesn´t mean they are rewarded less (in case the fear is to not earn enough by not compensating the post lenght by post number). Or is this indeed the case? "Earn well" is hard to define. I like to follow also some people, just because they have some interesting thoughts, even if they post not every day. Are you only posting for the reward? I mean is it a full time job or your own source of income? E.g. for me, it is just a side thing to my office job, still I try to post things hopefully interesting to others. If I get some upvotes, this is "success" as well. So not sure, how you define a successful blogger.
If successful blogger cannot be defined then what would encourage the new bloggers to improve? What does the model blogger look like and what is success? If blogging on Steemit is not sustainable even for established bloggers then blogging just will not be attractive.
In my follow up post I mentioned Patreon. Patreon is what Youtubers used when Youtube demonetized thousands of established Youtubers. Is it possible that this auto-vote trend is actually the beginning of implementing a Patreon like model on Steemit?
Why fight against it? Why not legitimize this model by using SMTs to make it even better? I do understand the issue with people not reading posts which is why shorter posts are encouraged because if you think maybe people don't have the time to read them all as a blogger you will get to the point.
But the issue here and choice really is does Steemit want to encourage sustainable income for established bloggers or not? If not then established bloggers have to get sustainable income from somewhere else.
Lots of good questions. I think Steemit wants to to encourage sustainable income for established bloggers, but the reward pool is limited and with the current approach and voting system no new posters will ever come in the situation the currently established bloggers are - which might turn out as a slow death to the platform if next year competitive platforms will start. Maybe the only solution is that current trending posters earn less as a price that the platform is attractive for newbies as well, so that a sustainable growth of Steemit can be ensured. Otherwise we have a kind of inbreeding situation, when the same people are posting forever. In part one can see this today, but just my gut feeling, as I have a limited overview only.