the problem how to encourage Steemians to seek and upvote quality content is still not completely solved.
It's not solved at all. After the hardfork and the birth of this #newsteem I thought that this is it. Owners of bid bots changed to manually upvote posts on Steemit and we won't have shitty posts boosted on the trending page or circle jerking. The part with boosting shitty posts on the trending page is kind of solved although some posts in my opinion have too much weight on them comparing with others that might have spend an hour or more to collect information and serve us a well documented article. Not in a thousand years in my opinion a vacation post with four photos is worth $40-$50.
Regarding circle jerking unfortunately it has survived but somehow is not something that involves only a group of whales or something similar. Now "thanks to" to the upvoting window you mentioned about the former bid bots in order to maximize their curation have simply put some users on auto vote and the job is done for the day.
I have had some upvotes from bid bots as well but not too many and nothing spectacular and it's probably that my blog is not spectacular :)). I would be for sure more motivated to invest much more time in my posts and really work for my blog but when I see almost daily payouts of $0.5 or 0.6 and very often zero comments on the post I get discouraged to put any more efforts.
The most upvoted posts nowadays seem to be the ones in the #travelfeed category and people started to post from their vacations three years ago or make some ten posts from a vacation to get some attention which leads users to try and fit a pattern which is not quite a "decentralized attitude" in my opinion.
Bottom line is the same convenience that auto votes offer to maximize curation profits that narrows the circle of users having a chance to big upvotes. Thanks to it quite a few good bloggers remain under the radar while others are constantly auto voted no matter what they post about. Steem has some work left to be done on it to become great. It's just a few tweaks here and there.
Good points!
(By the way I am also making different posts of one single vacation from time to time, but my main motive is to save all these precious memories on the blockchain - and the pics at least on a second database.)
I have such posts as well, but never got to the trending page... Lucky me :))
The idea is that there are tons of good meaningful posts besides the photography ones that get unnoticed thanks to auto votes determined by the curation window that you wrote about and also by maximizing curation revenues through this damn window. Bottom line this place will never be perfect in my opinion so we will have to learn to live with it as it is.
It will never be perfect, and every interesting suggestions has also negative aspects, but I still think we should try to improve things as good as possible.