I agree. Bidbots are essentially the main problem. They simply have too much power at this point and there is no curation involved. There was a time when the bots actually did some level of curation but now it's simply pay per vote which is agnostic to the content entirely.
Yup. While some bidbot owners do have separate curation initiatives it's honestly like a dictator throwing scraps to a bunch of starving people. That may sound overly dramatic... but the analogy stands up! As what you'll find in most of these 'so called' curation bots running separate from bot owners bidbots is that they are autovoting people who either work for the bot owner or who keep quiet and perpetuate the status quo. It's less about content than it is about political maneuvering from people who are gaming the system to the detriment of everyone other than themselves. They are taking directly from this economical system, without giving back anything (apart from to their supporters), while single handedly destroying steem's reputation in the wider crypto community and the mainstream. I'm still completely baffled why the community and steemit.inc puts up with this? It's not rocket science to join the dots on how these people operate.
I've been on the fence about powering down and waiting for my opportunity to sell at a reasonable price for a while now. Yet at the same time I've been tirelessly promoting steem on twitter and spearheaded a (failed) tweet storm to get steem listed on coinbase. I wonder why Brian Armstrong didn't respond in listing steem? We missed a golden opportunity to leap up in market cap and token price and It's undoubtedly for all of the reasons I've stated above. Coinbase won't list anything they deem shady! My desire to see steem work comes from both a selfish and an altruistic place. As a freelance writer, I envisioned steem could help support me in launching a digital nomad lifestyle. But also, I saw this platforms potential to fulfill business aims as well as decrease global poverty. How would this work?
This is how steem could have (and still could with done intervention) created a unique, world changing, virtuous cycle
I've put so much time and effort into steem in many ways - I was involved in building a charity on steem last year - not to mention losing first publishing rights on creative writing that I've been advised by a friend who works in publishing to take down. Curating for curie, teaching writing workshops in a discord community, all of these things I've done to make steem better and I'm quite angry about the way people have allowed steem to go. Steemit.inc could have used there missive stake or found development options to nip vote selling in the bud long ago. I understand that they want to remain impartial... but to the extent of allowing the whole thing to go to shit seems strange to me.
Ha ha, rant number three over 😉
Even services like Steem Follower work much better than Bidbots because with Steem Follower you still had manual curation. The bots essentially are, you pay for votes. So I'm specifically against paying for votes.
If it's about promotion then set up a separate mechanism for people to promote their work without completely breaking it for people who want to earn their way up.