Hey @whatsup good to see you again! :-)
If that Steem was really ending up in different hands, I'd fully agree with you. But if you do the maths the people who spend hundreds of SBD in order to promote one single post, lose money and don't win at all.
Minnows buying votes is not the source of the problem, and whales selling them neither. Minnows not being seen is the source of the problem :-)
The demand and popularity of the voting bots IMO is a direct result of the lack of a wider distribution and inability of other users to get views.
The amount of spammy posts are a direct result of "fear of using flags" and more human eyeballs on the site can help correct this if we provide either safe reporting or safe flagging of questionable content. (obviously it is going to be arbitrary)
Per the white paper the large stakeholders are going to have to "police" the large-stake holders or backup those who are actually trying to use the site to find, curate and post.
I don't agree. The use of bot come from human nature wanting to get an advantage and human nature wanting something easy. If we want to get attention, let's just pay a bot for votes... But what about quality posts that add to the community. Many of the flagging fools follow no one, run upvote bot businesses and then downvote those who they think are taking too much of the rewards. No added value at all.
Yes. I have considered going back to using bots just to get real users to actually see my posts when someone like you doesn’t need notice them because not everyone spends 24 hours on their feed and only 20 of my 1400 followers have any real weight.
Agreed. Most people aren't on the trending page or feeds. A lot of the weight comes in bot votes.
It is the whole "I don't wanna get caught flagging" thing going on. It would be interesting to see what would happen if there was a way to program in a kind of deflector shield that prevented against retaliatory downvoting. It would be tricky to implement, but theoretically worth discussing.
Incentivizing the good content and curation is one thing, but bot votes aside, we are still left with the problem of self-voting at a whale level. And I think @blocktrades says it best. Incentivize curation of others bringing it back to a 50/50 split of curation rewards.
At the VERY least, it will break up the earning capacity of the bigs, and leave more for us littles to swim in. If we can take a breath and see the bigger picture, we won't be annoyed by our lack of self-vote points.