It is a really tough thing to solve and I have thought a lot about the game theory behind all of this and where other social networks have in a way succeeded and became what we were used to and why STEEM feels weird and unnatural to most people.
Pretty much anywhere else curation of content isn't being paid for. It is more naturally currated by how entertained or engaged a person is.
Also there is no other social media site that is this open to where so much can be accomplished openly with automation.
Since curration could be passively automated with upvote bots this encouraged the content creators to make "content mills". Producing cookie cutter content and cranking it out consistently so they could be a "safe bet" for those with the ninja mine stake.
We see content mills / content farms on YouTube that somewhat exploit what they perceive to be the current YouTube algorithm but for the most part most of the channels that have grown a big audience made sense and was entertaining to a large set of REAL viewers
The next nail in the coffin was the ability to earn a bigger profit selling votes instead of doing manual voting or even the automated voting.
Now we have these people who have been rewarded for having a cookie cutter "content mill" where none of the content they produce could go viral anywhere on the Internet able to then turn around and say
Thanks for the votes....... now you can buy my vote!!!!
Solutions
Not easy to solve at all. First of all the distribution was messed up on this platform from the start. That made the system feel way more unnatural and weird. This could be resolved on here but won't be. Strategic airdrops from the Steemit account would be my solution but that won't happen.
Trending and Hot pages have to be changed to reflect actual content that is viewed a lot. Doesn't have over a certain percentage of the vote weight from bots, takes into consideration voters reputation and at least 200 SP so that the algo can't be gamed by large bot trails...etc. Nothing will be perfect but if those pages were changed it would take the incentive for people to be playing king of the mountain with the vote bots.
There is no content produced for the STEEM blockchain that could go viral anywhere else on the Internet basically the way things are now.
Also I think that ads being implemented on the platform and then doing a revenue sharing with content creators could help make there be an incentive to actually create content that drives traffic. Instead of just having content mills.
It is a tough problem to solve but ultimately I don't feel that being able to take away a vote after delegating power will do too much.
Nice writeup. I just have a feeling that Steem.inc supports bidding bots nowadays, which won’t take Steem anywhere.
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Yeah I haven't figured out completely what exactly the deal is but If you follow the rabbit hole deep enough the @steemit account will send funds to @steemit2 and then @steemit2 will send to @alpha and then that account is receiving payouts from @buildawhale and @appreciator .
Then those funds get sent to @bittrex like a big pile of them got sent 2 hours ago likely to sell on the market.
So yeah I don't know what exactly is going on but based on what I'm seeing it would seem that they Support bidbots if they are collecting earnings from them and then selling the STEEM on Bittrex.
Exactly. Not sure what their plan is. BTW: thanks for providing their transfer route, I haven’t digged that deep yet :)
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