We cannot eliminate such behavior entirely, but we can make it less economically viable.
100% this. We have to take steps to shape the system in a way where even the greediest of people will have to act in ways that benefit the whole ecosystem rather than slowly milking it to its death and forcing everyone else to either follow suit or feel like they're being left behind and wasting time when others are just aiming to maximize their own short term profits with minimal effort(read: zero)! I'd guess it doesn't take long for people to change camps, I know I'm selling almost 100% of my votes now after vocally being against bidbots since the day they appeared. I've read from all over the place here on Steem, how active members are sad that they aren't actively curating anymore. I know how that feels, I'm a bit gutted as well, this isn't the Steem we were promised at all. And if you're asking why these people don't just curate, what's stopping them, you might want to spend some time pondering how this current situation affects individuals over a long period of time. I've been active Steem member for around 2 years now and I've regularly browsed the trending, it's never been stellar but back then it was other members voting for people rather than literally anyone being able to buy the top spots (these days this is required actually) without any community support or content discovery happening. We're being shoved bad content down our throats... As you can imagine, I'm not checking Trending daily anymore.
We've all heard the saying one bad apple spoils the whole barrel, and we're seeing that in full action here on Steem. Majority of stake is selling their votes passively, content discovery is minimal and manual curation just isn't happening because it isn't worth it. Just look at our "trending", is it something to be proud of or does it show that proof-of-brain exists on this platform, like at all, and that should be our main attraction! (See reddit as an example here).
I'm not sure about anyone else here, but I'd like to one day use Trending to actually see the best content submitted to our blockchain, that's actually worth reading and sharing to others (read: interesting, quality content rather than just another ad or an attempt by the author to benefit from their readers in some way).
If we can't accomplish a trending that's actually attractive to outside visitors, this place is doomed in the end. I could go on and on why this is so important but system that's fair will attract people over something that is not. Steem has always had a hard time representing itself as a fair system, fixing these issues would help us immensely in building our reputation back up again (It's never been high, let's fix that).
Seeing all the changes Eli has done and her leadership makes me hopeful, this post is showing that you guys are ready to truly lead this ship and I really like that. We've needed a captain since Dan left!
This isn't the first lengthy post from me on this issue, and probably won't be last either as long as I own some Steem and care about the future of this decentralized social media platform.
Let's make Steem great again!
