I personally don't hate bid bots.
It all depends on how you use it, its only bad when its abused. I see it as a way of promoting your content( good and creative content) . When you are on board no one knows and at times the babies usually have quality content. If you want to wait without using bid bot you might never be recognized.
The bottom line is this: If you have good contents and you have the money I advice you to use the bid bots.
NOTE: NOTHING THAT WILL NOT BE ABUSE IN THIS WORLD. MONEY SPEAKS THATS WHY MAJORITY ARE ABUSING BID BOTS
D is for Decentralized.
The platform will look exactly in a way YOU make it.
You said in the comment that's because of "whales simply upvoting themselves".
I'm not a whale, I don't even post much, and I've never used a bid bot... (and just recently I flagged few cases of excessive bid bot usage with my negligible SP) but the reality is not that simple as you are saying.
Look at your own voting example: ( 65.96 % self, 47 upvotes, 13 accounts, last 7d ) (source: steemworld.org). Saying that "others do that" is a really bad excuse. Especially that deeds on the blockchain stays forever.
And yes, you are right, there are no evil tools, it all depends on how you use them, that includes various paid voting services (actually calling it "bidbots" is very unprecise, as that's just a subset)
I think that the best alternative for voting bots when it comes to content visibility is a cooperation of a professional and honest manual curators and high staked investors powered by some ways of automation like curation trails on steroids.
That, plus maybe changing author reward split from 75%/25% to something towards 60%/40% or even 50%/50% can in a long run make original, high quality contnet stand out from the crowd and improve the platform.
Low quality content on a trending page makes us look silly.
If we say to the world (through the trending page) that some garbage is worth 1000 STEEM on our platform, then how much they can value STEEM? What profit you will make earning 1000 STEEM if STEEM itself would be worthless?
Also @baah is making a fair point with highly undervalued PROMOTED feature, which needs some more love.
I think 50/50 split would be a great experiment, but this idea has been already discussed for some time and based on my observation, a majority of users like it (dunno if a majority of stake tho).
So I have a question - when should we expect this change? I assume it requires a hard fork (correct me if I'm wrong), so maybe HF20 would be a good fit?
Yes, it's not a new idea, however I'm not sure if that can get into HF20 (I would rather want to keep that separate from other changes), especially if that would mean delaying HF20 even more.
Would it really be that hard to have 50/50 split like you said and a SBD/SP payout option for curators that mirrored author rewards... would be cool to see that option.
Yeah, it's nice to know that if you believe you have good content, there is a way to get it seen. That was never the case before bid bots
Yes because there was enough content curators then.
Now we just have a bunch of whales simply upvoting themselves
You are damn right @orisfina I wish to be a whale someday curating other people. My vote is too small to do a damn thing :(
You are trying your best @tngflx . Imagine if everyone has the same mentality as you and all trying their possible best to curate. Steemit will be a much better place.
Nevertheless i wont give up, i will keep doing my best even though my SP is low. Just wish i could lease some SP because i have seen new babies we need to support
You aren't getting my point...
You are taking it personally.
We are only sharing our personal thoughts towards the issue, lets not be sentimental .
It hasn't gotten to that
Ok now you are getting what am driving at
I don't think there is anything wrong with self voting your content. Especially if you spent lot of time creating it and it's "good." I would have a problem with it, if for example you never voted on anyone else's content...At the point as you said "the line" has been crossed.