IDK where to start with tackling the problem of vote sell bots because making curating more rewarding/fun by drastically increasing the rewards for popular posts could start a slow migration back to organic voting and curation trails yet that wouldn't necessarily stop people from gaining exposure through the bots and the bots in turn building their STEEM and SBD up while reaping even more rewards should a post turn out to be popular.
Maybe instead of trying to fight the bots we could join them so to speak.. so that there is a development to make investors "sponsor" authors or make vote buying part of the system. The healthy way and intended feature was the promoted tab and then one would think that that the simple solution would be to make the weight/benefit of the promoted feature outweigh spending money on votes from bots.
I take it that your bot is a vote selling bot and clearly you made the right choice, how can you argue with reaping the benefits of both curation rewards and instant moola, it's a no brainer that wasn't forseen by the community for months.
If I remember correctly the first voting bot was the famous berny randowhale and that was around march? so when it did happen it was something that many should have seen coming (Intentional manipulation for profit) but did not and since then I haven't heard any solutions to this, besides the one bot (forgot the name) which came out a few months after randowhale capitulated on the oversight, which would vote and use the money you'd send the bot to promote the article which clearly is the best alternative as the closed loop of profit (exponential much algorithm) is broken and we don't run the risk of creating a bubble by inflating the value of the coin and token as the value sent to the bot is burned/locked in the null account.
Clearly all of that happened long before the korean blow up of SBD so it doesn't have much to do with it but it certainly didn't help the situation and has been compounding (...) since.
My logic is that if you increase the Curation incentive then there is more Curation and Authors don't need to rely on Vote Bots so much to get exposure.
I guess there will always be vote bots and they are including some standards recently like post age limits (to ensure bots are used for promotion rather than profit incentive) and some bots owners are also doing blacklists and applying some post quality filters. So in a way this is a form of curation but I do think it goes against the spirit of the systems intended decentralised design.
HF17 I think is the correct number - being able to lease your stake. This allowed the vote bots to grow, but it had also allowed the likes of utopian and dtube to attract a lot of new users, thus pushing up the rankings, I presume.
@baah: "IDK where to start with tackling the problem of vote sell bots"
How about you just stop using them and encourage your followers not to use them either, and they encourage their followers....
@buggedout, why not find a real person on here that votes the way you would and delegate to them?
If there is no market for the vote bots, there won't be any vote bots. It's just that simple. Just like throwing drug dealers in jail doesn't solve the problem of drug sales. As long as there are users out there, someone will be selling.