I apologize in advance if I missed something from your post and website @minnowbooster
My main concern is who can buy the votes?
Is there a rigorous curation when assigning upvotes? Or is it random?
I would find it very frustrating to know, despite all the good intentions that you may have, if individuals that have stacks of Steem could buy themselves power without delivering useful content to the community.
I am sure that many of us here have left certain platforms (cough cough Facebook) years ago due to all the gossipy appalling spamming and idiotic brain-dead sycophantic zombified news.
I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that this community won't be tainted with greed and other useless shit.
We have our terms of service and we enforce them on a daily basis. Spammers get their votes removed and are banned from using our services. And if you sell your vote through us and notice your vote being used on content you don't like, tell us and we will find a solution.
Fighting spam is an every lasting effort and we are constantly developing our toolset to deal with it.
that is good to know :)
Looking forward to seeing this project develop.
Are you guys considering rewarding flaggers? I think it would help the ecosystem if minnows could be protected and rewarded for flagging spammers/wales. I can definitely see the flip side of that as well :/ what are your thoughts?
I would love to reward flaggers but where would I take the funds for that? I think that is something the Blockchain has to implement
Anybody who has SBDs can buy votes. The problem with votes of MB right now is that they are small so they will mainly help minnows.
Hey Andrew, I understand that part.
My reservation in using this service is that I do not wish for people to buy votes when their content is quite frankly useless. For me, that perpetuates the concept of who has money has power. I would like to think that this is a platform where you earn Steem Power and now buy yourself to the top.
In my frenzy of frustration I might not have made myself terribly clear haha
Maybe I just live in a utopian idealist mindset.
Maybe I just live in a utopian idealist mindset. - I believe you do, at least for the moment. I stopped using voting bots a week ago I guess only because they were mainly used by people who were not producing quality content. The platform here has an interesting vision about valuable content. And with money, almost everybody can buy upvotes. Minnowbooster has some mechanisms of detecting spam and plagiarism, and they also have a blacklist, as few other bots I saw have started to make and do not allow these people to use the bots.
This is a good thing for Steem, but still who has plenty of money can upvote themselves their content and push it up like a lot. So you can say that who has the money, has a louder voice :D
I liked your light-hearted conclusion to the blue paper. Valuable content is completely subjective and I cannot argue with that.
Is it wrong to weed out the "pop-corn trail"? Or to be angry at those that abuse their loud voice?
Until now didn't really think of how easily miss interpreted the blue paper could be...