You're not on trending and I am reading your post and answering the proposition in it. I'll repeat some of what I said in chat:
People who originally got upvotes prior to bid bots did it with a) their own SP, b) their friends' SP, and c) with votes purchased behind closed doors. This is still very common and you probably know numerous individuals lost free delegations for that very practice.
Using terminology that applies to traditional private media platforms and other elements of pure central control like "censorship", "silence", and "suppress" is inaccurate on a decentralized blockchain. It would literally take a hardfork to outright censor something. Everything is on the blockchain.
The fact that content is always on the blockchain (despite how its displayed through various front ends) means that said content is always visible and read. My most popular post is one I made a year ago. It still gets a lot of visibility despite never having been on Trending or anything close. Content visibility and the received payout and prominence on the Steemit frontend are all different things.
The bid bot owner has the right to control whom their property, which is the bid bot, upvotes and downvotes. It is their account, their stake, and their property. It's literally their use of their stake, which is a key principle the blockchain was designed on.
As I said in chat, I agree the Trending page should not be the landing page of anything. All that does is hamper the user experience.
No matter how large the stake, content can't be suppressed. Your posts are part of the blockchain until you remove them. No one except you, no Zuckerberg or anyone else, can change that.
The vote muting idea can work but with a lot of effort on each user's part. They'd have to manually filter based on specific usernames (to remove their effects), which they'd have to list. This is something that you'd have to set up on your own condenser and test to be honest. Once you start you may find other problems and false positives. For example, I've got a curation script that I don't use. It's coded to determine who the greatest curators are and to follow their votes. It excludes all bots and similar automated accounts. While it works, it gets stumped by trails of staked accounts. So no matter what, the feed I get from it is still far from perfect and more often than not, where you'd think A ---> B it's actually A ---> (C, D, E in various relationships) ---> B.
Tagging @paulag here since I believe she had a Trending version without the bots somewhere already too.
Thanks for your thoughts here.
I was not aware that people lost delegations for selling votes, no. The idea proposed here would allow everyone the opportunity of filtering their feeds by their own subjective decision regarding voting behaviours - this could include muting of clear voting collusion and sale of votes if the individual user so chose.
When the ability of a user to thrive fairly on a platform depends on them having 'reach' and exposure (such as can be provided by the trending page) and that reach/exposure can be limited and controlled by others subjectively and without recourse, then it is not wrong to describe that as a form of suppression. Not only will their post artificially be seen by less people and receive less payout, they will lose motivation doubly - partly through the points already mentioned and partly because those who are not being held back (and in fact actually boosted) will often not represent (to them) 'better' work than theirs. It is like working in a factory where some workers get paid more and more promotions, despite producing less output and more broken products simply because of who they know or agreements reached behind the scenes. Very demotivating. In terms of the idea of 'silencing', it is true that the blockchain itself is not totally scrubbed in such cases, but how many people (even who know about the situation) will actually go and look at the blockchain to hunt down posts that have been lost down the memory hole? Almost none. Besides which, the posts I am talking about are not actually being 'hidden' in the sense that downvoting does - they are simply being made very hard to find - just as google has been doing with just about any pages that don't conform to the 'official' version of 'normal'. (note: google received the largest every corporate fine for this behaviour from the EU last year).
Reputation feeds from post payout and post payout feeds from short term visibility and reach. Limiting one, limits the others. You may not be receiving the same traffic, payout and reputation if you are not visible on trending - which is patently unfair and demotivating. Why should your hard work in the long term be used more effectively by others simply because they are willing to buy votes? Steem is meant to offer 'proof of brain' in the form of ordered lists of posts according to that 'brain' - without such a feature, the entire economic model and incentive structure is lost. It will not be difficult for competitors to take Steem's momentum just by solving this gap.
Nothing in my proposed solution prevents bid bot owners selling votes or doing exactly what they have been doing all along, it simply gives average users the ability to excuse themselves from also receiving the effects of the bid bot 'service'. Advertising companies get paid a lot of money and work with property owners to put up billboards just to get inside the head of random people. Those random people may not have much choice other than to walk around looking at the ground - that's not very civil or friendly imo.
The trending/hot pages are part of the issue, but the entire design model of steem is based around having such ordering of posts.
See above. You might be demotivated to the point of removing them yourself for the reasons already stated.
I can think of numerous ways to make the filtering process simple and effective. Facebook have already shown part of how I think it would work well - the rest would be relatively simple to add in. The method of tracking votes and removing the voters that we personally disagree with would only require us to mute the voter that votes at the end of the trails - I'd need to see a real world example of the problem you are describing with your curation bot to respond in full to that idea. I am speaking with the Steempeak team to discuss the possibility of implementing this there and also thinking of putting up a test trending page on steemocean too.
I stopped being demotivated about two years ago and long gave up. I'll reply properly if I can think of something constructive to add in a bit.
hehe - good for you! i got over the issues here mainly because I got a lot of help and support from pro-active whales and others, but not everyone has that support. as a system 'guy', I like to take the principles that work and try to apply them so that everyone can benefit.. I see this approach as one way to do that.