I replied it on your comment on the grumpycat's post, I hope it is somewhat worth seeing if you don't read it there.
The posts on the trending page upvoted by bidbots don't deserve to be there!
That's what the real problem is, most of the people think that the low-quality posts dominate the trending page and they don't deserve to be there.
Now, as the founder and developer of the smartsteem, I know that you can't check each and every post upvoted by your service, and I definitely know that you want to make steemit a better place and help people here.
So, instead of concentrating on all the users, how about you concentrate on the users bidding for big upvotes?
I mean nobody cares about if anyone gets 1$ upvote from any bid bot( small abusers can be handled easily by making guidelines and rules, blacklisting) but the ones who make it to the trending or hot page, everyone has got eyes on them, and it is your service that will be held responsible for taking them to the top of hot/trending level.
So if you check all the users who bid big( which would be about 1 or 2 in every 2.4 hours, that makes a maximum of 10-12 posts a day), you can considerably improve the quality of posts upvoted by your service that makes it to the trending page
Everyone downvotes trending posts upvoted by bid bots because of its mediocre quality, that results in loss of the users and gains hate for your services. But if the quality of the posts is good, people will upvote the posts, it will be beneficial for both the user and your services. The scenario will be completely opposite to the current one.
You said it yourself that it took more than half a year for you to develop smartsteem, now I know that you don't want it to end in a way that people will remember it as a service that supported abusers. A service hated by a lot of people.
The whole thing depends upon how inclined you are to find a solution to improve the quality of posts upvoted by your service. That will help everyone, the investors, users. And more people will support the users in future if their post quality is good, that makes a long-term benefit for the user for the one-time investment, rendering your services more useful.
In the end, I believe that this is quite an opportunity for your service to make this a better place not just for the content creators, but for content absorbers too, as of now, most people create content, very few read it.
Why not? Afaik they are only allowing people after reviewing their profile and content (to look reasonable). Every post can be checked but who is smartsteem to decide what should I see or not? Is this why we should abandon greedy centralized social networks?
Possible solution is shut it off unfortunately. It might sounds harsh but it's for the greater good. It's just a matter of time that another network/coin will be available for us without this kind of services. When it happens, all those stake-holder just going to watch us leaving one by one. Than they try to out-bit their own contents.
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Truth is I never go to the trending page because of the bots. This also means I miss a lot of good content as I haven't found another way to find good content yet.