I think there will never be a universal consensus over these issues. This is, after all, a decentralized community of users. We can discuss and try to get people to agree on some kind of standards, though.
I downvote when I see blatant abuse like plagiarism or vote farming with substandard content (relative to the rewards). I apply stricter standards to what I see in Trending. I want to do my part to make sure that nothing that gets to trending has votes bought with a positive ROI. It's insane for a platform to pay someone to advertise on it.
I'm personally not into going after vote trading clubs or SBI because there is a lot else going on that needs to be downvoted. But I understand why that account goes after structured and impersonal, totally content-agnostic vote trading schemes such as upvotebuilders or SBI.
I think SBI is a mostly negative thing because it's all about buying votes for yourself and a little to a buddy. It's a structured self-voting scheme that has some sort of a very loose quality control policy. SBI votes would be better used by curating someone else's posts particularly now that the 50/50 split is in effect.
Thanks for your comment!
Interesting to see your reasoning regarding downvotes and the critique about vote trading and SBI.
I understand these arguments. I thought SBI was a great thing because of the fact that you enroll/sponsor fellow steemians. A nice way to show appreciation for the content and comments of others with longer lasting effects for them than just an upvote.
But I'm for a change in their upvote policy based on quality of content! That would be a really nice move and the critique part of being quality agnostic in their votes would go away.
Cheers!
Lucky
Not true. As far as I read it, the ROI is smaller than what your buddy gets.
Ok. But it is content agnostic use of the reward pool anyway.
There's nothing wrong with being content agnostic. We all used to upvote our friends posts by 100% and that didn't matter then, why should it matter when we let a bot give a small vote every now and then?
I don't see the reason to complain when the vote sizes never ever make anyone's post trend, or make them rich.
Also, it allocates a certain amount of votes on a weekly bases, and if the person only posts one post per week, they get a larger vote per post, than he would if he posted say 25 posts per week.
Concerning your idea about the bot voting for the most upvoted post... I don't see a reasonable way to allocate the votes to the most upvoted post if the users have different styles of creating content. Some only post one post per week, some do it more erratically. The bot needs to accomodate to that. And still it needs to be fair.
I think the way it does it now is as fair as it can possibly be, but if you have a better idea, please share.
If however there is a concern that the bot-owner will run with the sponsorships, one idea is to automate the bot via a smart contract, so that the funds will be only available to the bot and no-one else.
Lisäys: Kun joku käyttää terrorismia saadakseen tahtonsa läpi, ei sellaiselle paskalle anneta myönnytyksiä, koska seuraava terroristi vaatii aina pikkuisen lisää ja lopulta sille paskalle ei tule loppua.