I totally agree here, unfortunately not many can or will do the policing. I wish the parties that had that responsibility could reach further and wider. If the trash that gets submitted to my bot and others was flagged, they would stop abusing them.
I don't have the finances or manpower to police the 500+ posts that get submitted daily to @buildawhale.
I have a firm no plagiarism or stolen content stance, but it is a full-time job for 3 people to deal with the volume. As it is, everything I make with @buildawhale gets put back in to pay for steem power.
@themarkymark Why not run off of a whitelist? Every bot owner contribute some time or sbd to see its operation. That Steem Power that buildawhale grows is your nest egg and payment. If we do what's right and promote a clean healthy Steemit, then the price of Steem will go up(to $3,$4 or maybe even $10). That is your compensation for the time and work investment now.
If however, you have NO longterm faith in Steem or Steemit, we can all ignore the spam and just grab all the cash we can atm and try and be the first to bail when the ship gets overrun by rats and starts going down.
A whitelist would be a huge undertaking and would require endless maintenance and would require just as much work policing content as if I actively read all 400-600+ posts a day we receive.
I do agree that there needs to be quality moderation for upvote bots, but it only works if ALL of them offer it, or if no one delegates to the ones that don't have some kind of moderation scheme in place.
One way to deal with shotpost upvoters is require registration and account "approval" process to prevent shitposter accounts from using the votebot. But again, that only works if ALL the teams running bots started doing that.
That doesn't work either, all you have to do is submit one good post and be approved, then you are free to shit post. The post doesn't even have to be authentic, just pass the approval process. The solution is to police every link.
I'm already losing money paying everything I make back to pay rent, there is no way I can manage that nightmare of a problem.
That's a flawed moderation system. How about: only accounts that are over a month old, have rep above 25 (haven't fucked anything up in a month) and have an introduction / verification post. Hell, steem.global asks for a selfie in a comment thread to prevent abuse of the faucet. Asking for users to register and have some kind of proof of consistency in quality isn't much to ask for.
Then why are you still doing the bidbot? Sounds like time to cut losses and move on to a better business model.
It offers a valuable service to new users who are struggling. We also offer a lot more than just a bid bot.
Who actually buys that line? Wouldn't honest curation being managed with delegated SP provide 100X the benefit, encouragment, direction and oversight??
Buying bids only provides an endorphin service to struggling new users. Minnowbooster is good if used by honest content creators because it gives an ROI that is calculable(115%+) AND all the added visibility benefits(on those rare occations it moves a post up into visibility).
I contrast, 90% of the time bid bots have you breaking even or losing on an immediate ROI.
Which is why 25-50% of all whale Steem Power would need to be delegated to small curators (on 30, 90 or 120 day periods) in order to spread out the work of curating quality content.
If all the large sp holders prefer immediate profit than platform performance, then a whitelist is the only other ethical solution I can think of.
If you are okay with spam winning the day, then, by all means just keep doing everything as is now and await a HF magical unicorn to save the day.