I kind of agree with you on bid bots. I personally feel that the quality level of content with multi dollar earnings is quite low. I use steemit to follow interesting people and learn something from their blogs (that's one of the reasons for using steemit, besides the monetary aspect associated with it). The second reason is that I want to write about cryptocurrency (being a professional financial investor) and bring some realism to the investment aspect of cryptocurrency. However, lots of content that trends is really really bad. I have seen literally copy paste articles without mentioning the source earning 20 bucks, and such articles should not be earning anything (and such things make me a little disheartened because my original well-thought article sometime have only 1 vote - my own).
I have also read about the argument in favour of bid-bots - its like advertising so that your content can become more visible but may be there is a solution to that and I am not sure how much that is doable - remove any SP delegation to bid-bots or assign 0 value to bid bot upvotes/autohide bid bot comments. So one will still be able to trend but not make money out of it (Also pardon me if I have made a huge error in my fundamental understanding of how steemit works)
I had a question though.. how can i check whether someone is using autovoting or bidbots? Manually by going through every voter?
Yeah, you click on the upvote arrow and see who voted, and recognize the bots.You can check a longer list in steemd.com by replacing 'it' with 'd' like so: https://steemd.com/steemit/@krnel/why-don-t-i-upvote-your-content-anymore-even-if-i-like-it
If you want to know who is a bot, check the bot tracker site https://steembottracker.com/
As for delegations, you can't really remove delegations unless delegations site-wide are removed...
It sucks being new now, especially with bidbots and trying to organically gain a following based on the content you put out. many people swarm to favor the vote buyers because they are "popular" in the trending page... psychology at work... low-level thinking :/
Thanks for the two links.
I believe i have learnt much more in the last week by interacting with the right kind of people than i did during the first one and half months.