I spend 10-60 hours a week researching, identifying, and punishing spammers, plagiarists, fraud, and abuse.
Wouldn't it be more rewarding to close the bot and invest that time in manually curating posts that resonate as qualitative high with you, as it was ment back in those old days? Everyone has a different opinion on quality, even changing on a daily basis, but by creating the opportunity for abuse there will be abuse, out of despair, greediness, necessity or even out of kindness not to go an even darker route. Are spammers annoying? Yes. Do I judge without knowing the background? I do, but not being conscious about the motive, or that I could be in the same situation too, lacking the skills, opportunities or peace of mind. It never is pure black or white.
I agree. If people with bigger voting power curate post of better quality, the junk will tend to be less prominent overall.
Solid point. However, they have every right to choose to Steem how they want. If creating an opportunity for use gets misused, it's not the same as creating an opportunity for abuse.
If I dig a well for everyone in my tribe and someone taps it for their tribe, should I shut down the well and just go get my own water?
Further, I can say for certain that there wasn't a way that it was meant "back in the days" that I'm aware of. I will read the whitepaper again.
I would compare it to an enormous dam, messing with the ecosystem, the wildlife and destroying tousands of small towns and villages.
My point is that nobody knows what misusing according to the bot creator is, because he takes the money first and punishes later.
But the bot creators are pioneers. One day someone will come up with a smart AI-Solution because he spent 10-60 hours a week into that instead of manually cleaning the mess of his botchy bot.
The motive was to create first and to curate later, I'm not talking about the white paper but @dan's vision:
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/curation-rewards-and-voting-incentive