Very limited is not the best words to use there. I know of at least two dozen, off of the top of my head, that refuse to post anything substantially qualified as 'quality' (which is also subjective to the eye of the beholder), simply because their posts consistently got overlooked and were never curated 'properly' as they should have been. It still happens. I used to write massive stories that took hours to compose between gathering proper graphics and making it 'pretty'. Sure a few reached 100+ dollars - but only because of bidbots. Not a single actual whale vote aside from grumpycat who thought I made too much on it. I recently wrote a story on my first fish, I thought it deserved at least 15$ but nope. Nothing. 6 minute read with over 1000 words.
Which, is a whole other ballgame there. There is a post right now on trending from @krnel that is twice as good in my mind (pun intended) as the one written by @acidyo about @ocd. Krnel's is worth half as much. The one from Krnel is also a shorter read than my fish story. What gets the most attention around here seems to mostly pertain to the blockchain and actual content creators, don't get near the credit they deserve. The 'whales' would rather just support the 'whales' so they can remain the 'whales'. Not all, but most. Voting habits and the blockchain doesn't lie. Some even sit at 100% VP/Mana for days until one of their 'whale' friends makes a post. And we won't even get into the biases from 'communities' and the separation that bred into the system.
Shitty auto-voting is bad, but I use it. Not necessarily for the curation, but to offer steady support because like you, I can't be here 12 hours a day. I am in agreement with you though (once again - kind of an odd thing, but hey, it's been happening more frequently the past few months), reducing the curation rewards is not the answer. The actual content creating community, all inclusive of Hive, was already pretty upset when it went to 50/50 and so many had to adapt. You take that away again and as you say, we will be hard pressed to attract any investors or even users, for that matter.
I still stand by my words, even if every author was a "good author", we still have very few.
Really you mean as they feel it should have been. There is no "should have been" here. I've seen a duct tape meme get voted $943, and good posts make less than $1. You have to put in the work in any social media before you build an audience. That involves posting and engaging consistently. Social media is hard, yet Hive is still far easier than any I have seen do to the lack of competition, but it is far from fair.
The first half of this statement is a gift to the community, the second half is depressing.
I disagree, I don't do this, and most of the whales I know don't do this. There are not many of us. It isn't usually whales doing this, it's dolphins and orcas. A lot of the whales are in fact spreading their votes very thin to optimize curation or voting a group of favored authors (potentially friends). I don't see the behavior you describe often at the whale level.
This is a systemic problem on Hive, people think because they do something they are owed something. Unless you have a contract, then it is up to the community to decide what it is worth. But I will agree 100% there is no consistency in voting based on quality here. This is a result of decentralization, favoritism, ulterior motives, and just poor content discovery options. EIP has done wonders for helping in this department, many more stakeholders are voting outside of their circles. It isn't perfect but the end result has been a vast improvement over Old Steem. No change we make will ever get us to where we want to be, but if we can get closer that is an improvement.
Not claiming to be entitled, but I did go to college for English Journalism. So, I can actually deem myself a decent judge as to what quality should be. It's not what you know or how much heart and soul you put into a post here. It's who you know. Simple as that, and the same goes for any centralized system as well. I've seen crapass posts worth well beyond their limits too. My point is, many a good and often a great thing gets overlooked. Which is one reason I feel auto-votes are a good thing. Take @snook, for example. She likes to make people smile, and that's one of the reasons I love her. She is in my autovoter because I don't care if she posts a video, 3 sentences or three chapters. I'm supporting HER. I know her. And maybe a few days later, I might have enough time to comment my thoughts on her post. Maybe it's 8 days later and I missed the deadline to even give her a vote! Or wait, no I didn't, she's on auto - man I love those things.
I agree, and I'll quote my parent comment.
"This is a result of decentralization, favoritism, ulterior motives, and just poor content discovery options."
My original comment brings this up as well, I do the same thing. I use votes to support people, not always specific pieces of content. I like to support authors I believe that are creating good content and /or putting in effort. If I see something that stands out, I vote that as well. An important thing if you use votes to "support people" is reviewing those votes and those people as people tend to change when given automatic votes.
I do regularly just like you. I have my personal options and my community ones. Some are similar. But I'd say only half of, maybe less, haven't actually counted, of my votes are auto. Most of my personal is manual. I don't care if I get down in the 60% range, it's not just about the curation for me. Retaining users is a struggle itself. We wouldn't be much without them.
I think they are a bad thing, because they make people too lazy to discover new posts or also honor efforts of former 'bad' authors to improve or just unknown writers.
It's easy to upvote 'good' authors automatically all the time but difficult real, hard work to find great posts.
People don't want to discovery "new posts" because it's a lot easier to farm on defi and do nothing, earning 10-20x yield returns even if it does collapse.
The Auto Voting is a serious problem if you want a social unicorn. On the flip side, poor returns from APR yields is a serious problem if you want a blockchain unicorn. It's not to say by any means you need any APR, or staking for that matter, it's just for this comparison since rewarding is still in plans along with inflation.
It needs to to go strongly in one direction or the other. Currently all the mechanics are in the middle.
New Investors:
And it's important to get new investors unfortunately, because that's how the entire mechanics work for any asset class, stock or crypto for that matter.
We need to support more experimenting like @blocktrades proposal and attempt more radical changes(a bit less focusing on "finding the sweet spots"). More extremes imho.
Not sure that's true either. My feed is full of them. I wouldn't follow someone if I didn't think they didn't do good work. What would be the point in following a terrible author?
I don't like the concept of 'good' authors, I prefer the idea of upvoting good posts! :)
Upvoting 'good' authors automatically means being too lazy to read and evaluate posts, means allwoing 'good' authors to be lazy too, as they receive upvotes independently from the quality of their posts, means not giving 'bad' authors the incentive to improve and have the chance of receiving upvotes when writing better posts than before, means to keep ignoring new, unknown users which leave the platform as fast as they came, because nobody makes the effort to seek for posts manually.
I see not a single reason why I should get less curation rewards when manually upvoting a two days old post which I had really read and evaluated than someone who didn't work at all but just let a programm do the job!
You may read more about my point of view here, here and here.