On the scot bots I partially agree since I can see how that can be detrimental to the price of Steem. In the same breath I recognise that most minnows and dolphins are moving over to condensers because curation over on Steemit is practically non existent unless you are in a particular inner circle.
I have been curated twice by the people at smartsteem on non-sport related content. However, like costanza I prefer talking about sports and you never get curated for such content hence the need for the bots.
I am sure if he never used the scot bots he wouldn't have been downvoted. But if he did not use the other bots as well, how will he compete for less than a handfull of manual curators in a sea of minnows and dolphins?
Is vote trading or buying acceptable? Probably not but it cannot be eliminated. I would even go as far as to say that using automated voters is just as bad or even worse.
How many of us have our friends on autovoters? Do we even care if they are posting quality posts?
Where do we draw the line?
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Gaming curation by auto voting doesn't remove any more rewards from the reward pool than regular voting. Whether you get 200% curation efficiency or 20%, your vote removed the same amount of rewards from the reward pool. It just messes with other people who are voting on that same post and they have a choice to vote on that post or not.
Autovoting is only a serious problem if it is trading back and forth with the same people automatically.
Most of the people using auto voters are just slightly gaming curation or doing it for their convenience. In the grand scheme of things, it is not a problem at all. I hope this clears things up.
This is where we are losing each other. The vote amount is not what is in question but the post itself. Automatic votes means that the account owners are not actually going around looking for new content to support and neither are they evaluating the content they are autovoting. Everybody is entitled to do whatever they want with their upvotes though.
Here is an example. Blocktrades had to downvote their own post because it was a duplicate. But look at the number of upvotes. All that is happening because there is no actual curation happening.
My problem is when these individuals go around downvoting people who promote their content with bid bots, which is not profitable if you are bidding the right way as I would call it. They intimate that you should post good content and hope to get upvoted. But how many accounts are actively manually curating the thousands of post daily?
Are minnows meant to wait for scraps or can't we promote our content at our own expense for visibility?
Just like costanza wrote, we are slowly killing off minnows and low level dolphins and that is slowly reflecting in the price of steem.
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I completely agree that a lack of manual curation is a problem. However consistanly good content creators do get noticed.
Maybe a lot of poor quality content creators who used bid bots to inflate their post values were also inflating their egos. In reality their content wasn't that good. Steem isn't here to reward people based on effort or those who make the most noise.
Find me some high quality content that isn't rewarded and I'll upvote it. It's difficult to find this. I can find a lot of crap that is over rewarded, but less and less.
Next we can deal with auto curation. However, it's a little harder to punish people for voting without punishing the content creator because everyone will just make alts for curation.
As for double posting. At least block trades downvoted it removing the rewards for those people who now wasted their votes. At worst, I've seen people self vote it. Actually, the best I saw was someone who had an emergency post saved for when it happened. Unfortunately, you cannot set beneficiaries or decline rewards after you post. It would need a hardfork to change this and it is a minor issue.
Relative to BTC the price and rank of Steem has increased since HF21 was implemented. This means the downvoting hasn't destroyed the price.
Admittingly, there was a decline in the value of Steem before the hardfork. This could have been whales and orcas running away. But statistics show the amount of whales and orcas and dolphins has actually increased and so have over all active accounts.
The decrease was probably related to people who foresaw the demise of bots (ie. the people only here to delegate to bots). Therefore, I think the price decrease was also a result of Steem doing an update that investors didn't want (EIP instead of SMTs), let's wait for SMTs.
This is actually the primary way people actually got noticed in the early steem days. Most of these people were able to build communities around themselves and those are the bigger dolphins and whales we have today.
The other way is to join a wave. I hated the EIP and agreed with proposal project and that set me apart from the wave. I could not be speaking up about the things I find wrong and that would reflect positively on my author rewards but that is not in personality. Just speak against bots and see how quickly ocd discover your posts.
I would love to see the stats on new accounts, active minnow accounts, power downs and power ups. That tells you more about the overall health of the blockchain ecosystem. I am sure you are aware Steem Inc stopped selling their Steem for a short period of time and that stabilized the coin in a torrid bear market.
But if people are no longer engaging as much as they used to pre-hardfork especially on lower level accounts that account for the largest group of individuals just tells you everything you need to know. Would you know where I can get such stats because I could do a deep dive and come up with a post. Right now I am going off more of my experience rather than irrefutable stats.
I was against the use of a non-linear reward curve. I would be more in favor of a step. Reducing rewards for people who earn under 2 Steem would have been more appropriate than 20 just to get rid of the people who are voting at 0.1% with only 20sp in their account or whatever.
I don't understand people used to get rewards by all sorts of ways. However, Steem has matured. Just think of the wild west analogy.
There are a lot of statistics out there for Steem. None of them I've seen are showing bad new as a result of the new Steem changes.
I follow abh12345's engagement league, the engagement seems stable. No one really cares that comment voting is no longer as common. Honestly, I think the decline in Steem's price stopped it just as much as anything. People will engage if the content is interesting or 'engaging' that's about it.