Ok, so I checked the first one, @slowwalker, seems to a lot of his votes from @exyle.
You would think that if a whale Orca was really curating for "quality" they would use a variable weight. But I guess all of @slowwalker's latest posts were just THAT good! 💯
If I were voting on them, this would be the point that I would be strongly considering unvoting @blockbrothers for witness due to what appears to be a collusive pattern.
I wonder how many of these other non-bid bot trenders are also engaging in a similar pattern. Again, curating quality usually means variable weight. Constant 100% like Rancho to Haejin. Well.. that looks a bit squirrely if you ask me.
It's been going on the entire life of Steem. There was a group that were given votes and delegated steempower, they made each other dolpins-orcas and although in most cases the delegations are gone, the circle jerk isn't.
Now you might have a better idea why some of us are happy the voting bots came along, and why we are in no hurry to return to this.
Also, you may understand why the voting bots were created and why there is so much demand. My account is like 870th largest account. I have a little over a dollar vote. Without the bots, very few are going to make ANYTHING. Many who are yelling don't even understand how and why it all came about.
Yeah, I do understand what you mean, bid bots have positive aspects as well.
I thought about how I could improve @trufflepig's toplist and got an idea how to improve the entire Steemit ecosystem instead, and tackle many issues like voting bots, circle jerking, frustrating minnow experiences, and whale wars with a simple adjustment. I'll make a feature request on steemit's github tomorrow or today and I'll post my idea on utopian/steemit :-)
I thought about this, and this is my proposal on how to change the Steemit Blockchain to tackle this issue:
https://utopian.io/utopian-io/@smcaterpillar/steem-improvement-proposal-revoting-power-to-counter-upvote-circles-and-bid-bot-abuse