Most of them are designed to maximize earnings from the curation rewards game
Sounds bad...But wait...what one have to do to maximize earnings? Well, one have to vote for posts with maximum consensus.
If Bob is voting only for crypto staff, Alice only for recipes, John only for cat pictures and Mary somehow managed to create a post Bob,John,Alice and even never voting Sara couldn't resist to vote for, that would be exactly the post to vote for to get maximized earnings
So, someone operating that tipe of bot actually just sponsoring consensus. Because you can't get curation reward without giving author reward first, right ?
Well, a big question is what do you want to reach consensus on?
Well, any agenda, really)
There's three types of voters.
I don't think the third type is more evil that the first two )
What about consensus on what content is going to add more value to the platform and increase the value of STEEM?
If you want my personal opinion, content on Steemit is not supposed to bring value to the platform, because value is already here, and it's not content, it's technology.
So, author rewards is just some sort of advertising costs.
Among my friends circle I don't really know anybody who would be interested to be paid for blogging, but when I say that recently I made an transfer of 0.1 cent to my friend from another city with no commission my business friends want to know more.
The main reason why even those who already invested some money in Bitcoin are redundant about Steemit is exactly the fact, that investing in Steemit you don't know if the rules would be changed any time...and this discussion about eliminating curation rewards is actually just proving the point.
I disagree about the fact that content is not supposed to bring value to the platform.
I agree about the benefits of the currency completely on its own merits. I think STEEM has BTC beat, except for the level of adoption and use.
Changes to the curation rewards would not be touching the "purely currency" aspects of the coin, but I do agree with the sentiment that making changes to the rules adds a big layer of uncertainty to current and potential future investors.
That said though, I don't think that that reason alone should prevent us from making necessary changes to the blockchain that are going to make it better in the long run at this stage of the game.