That's a shame because the rep score counts a great deal as a measure that the account is investing here and an indication of how how serious the account holder is about being on steemit. It is an indication to me also the weight of the vote of that account (not necessarily in term of SBD value but how much a vote will help boost my own account rep and push my post into visibility).
Every individual if he believes in his product or his busines model, will invest in it. I invest by creating content I am proud of and by paying some of my actual investment to bid bots - this way I get high value votes. Otherwise I would never succeed. The alternative is begging for attention by producing content in line with what whales want to promote. That is like a pyramid system. When no one wants to read about how to steemit, what then? This system will only generate a certain kind of content and no one will arrive here to do business. It will eventually die out.
I believe that now with bid bots, people can purchase a better store front - it doesn't mean they will sell garbage. Some will o course, but most will not waste money doing that.
This is how I see it and I think not having the rep score on oneplace will count against the site eventually.
It is not meant as a gesture against bid bots, in fact we use them to promote our posts as well. But the initial meaning of reputation, as we understand, was not the measure of investment in the blockchain but rather of good standing and respect within the community. Now if you look at the list of accounts with the highest reputation you will see that @haejin has the highest reputation in Steem. Doesn't that prove that the reputation system is somehow broken?
I see what you are saying but it doesn't mean the score is not something everyone attaches meaning to @haejin got a reputation as a result of the support of a single whale. People may know this or not, but the account gets a high following and support snowballs. This is what I want too. We all want it. It is human psychology that people assume someone has some valuable advice, or someones support is valued based on what people observe. We can debate at length whether she has anything or not to offer, but people are going to conclude things from scores, money, flashy cars, beautiful clothes and so on.
When I use the platform, I do attach some meaning to what may later turn out to be meaningless... why not remove the avatar, it's as meaningless? Right? Why not blindfold the judges at a beauty contest because physical beauty is meaningless too. Get my point? ;-)
I know it may be mean nothing at times, but these small things add up and help us decide whether we want to look further then follow an account. I look first at rep, then account value then tags, then the degree type of comments an account user makes (by looking at the history of comments and replies), then the transfers the person makes - then the content. I do it that order, then I decide whether to follow or not. If the person takes time to engage in a discussion then I consider it a very good account to continue to follow (regardless of most of the other pieces of information).
I am attracted to oneplace because of the editing feature and the draft feature mostly. I don't like using busy because it lacks a few features that steemit.com has or it is just too different from steemit. If a site is going to be preferred to steemit, it needs to be free as yours is ;-) and it needs to give MORE information not less.
Anyway, that is just my way of doing it and what I consider important. I build up a sort of psych profile of the account holder. I use steemworld constantly also, so if you take a look at the things steemworld gives the user, you will also know what is important to many of us here.
Take care my friend. Thanks and I continue to watch the progress.