But don’t bots bring bad content to the trending page? Since anyone can have a positive ROI for promoting their post then they might as well right the easiest post possible and promote it to the trending page. This is how it was for a while.
But I see your point, if good content gets promoted as well, then some people will upvote it on top of the bot promotion. This will cause the good promoted content to drown the bad promoted content. I hadn’t thought of that. I have actually started noticing that the trending page is getting better compared to how it was a few months ago.
You just earned a follow from me!
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Thanks.
"Weak humans" bring bad content to the trending page. If humans were not so wretched and weak and always did the right thing, we wouldn't be where we are today ...
Bots sprang up because there was demand - it's simple economics: there's an unfulfilled need which can be fulfilled economically, someone is bound to do it sooner or later and the first will get the highest rewards ...
So we can change the economics of steem by for instance tweaking how downvotes work (good luck with that). But until you manage to get witnesses on board with that, let's do something within the boundaries of the current flawed rules
Have you thought about the cost to good content creators because of the lack of curation? If more people buy votes, more people will delegate to bots. The amount of SP for manual curation will keep shrinking.
The frequency of bot voting is also hurting investors such as myself as the value of votes are decreasing. I see an increase in the number of bots and delegation to bots hurts both investors and content creators.
The whole idea of manual curation seems to be a bit naive. Well intentioned, but it doesn't seem to work.
People will buy votes so other people will delegate to bots. As long as you have "people" in the equation, I don't think it will change. Bots hurt the ideal mechanic of manual curation, it's clear. So you can make many proposals on how to correct that and many proposals have been made already
I reckon the only approach is to admit that people won't change and manual curation, like communism (based on an ideal, altruistic human who "gives to the society his best and only takes from society what he needs") simply cannot work.
Once you went to the grief, I propose to embrace the bots - live the system for what it is, not for what it should ideally be
Manual curation works on other platforms. YouTube is a great example where people actively curate content. There are many videos with thousands even millions of likes. These likes help gain exposure for the creator as well as helps them earn ad revenue (eyes on content). YouTube does not pay people to like content. People click 'like' because they like the content. They click 'dislike' because they dislike the content.
So imagine how successful manual curation would be if people were paid to upvote the content they liked. We were close to that at the beginning. Now we need to pay (opportunity cost of using SP to curate content instead of sell votes) to curate content instead of be paid. If YouTube charged users to pay to 'like' videos, most people would not click 'like'. After all, they can still enjoy the content for free.
This takes me back to increasing curation rewards. Higher curation rewards will reduce the cost of curating to stakeholders and even make it profitable if done right. This also enables delegation to people who want to spend time curating content. These curators will earn from curating content. The Steem ecosystem will start to function again. Investors will see a return on their investment in terms of a price rise.
To facilitate delegating to curators, we should have delegation contracts specifying the terms of delegation and beneficiary rewards to delegators. I believe this should sway a sufficient number of investors to remove delegation from bots and support curators. Many believe 50% curation rewards will be sufficient, I have a little less faith in human nature and believe 75% will work. As it stands, there is general witness consensus for 50% as well as a downvote pool, which I think will help.
See post from @cervantes below.
‘Witness consensus status to fix the actual steem’s economic flows (ENG)’
This post was 4 months ago, so I am becoming a little impatient. I am also wondering why witnesses are not joining the discussions in this post. Might be time to give them a wake up call soon.
Edit: Another option is to remove or suspend the rewards pool. Inflation could be reduced to 4%, 20% to witnesses, 20% to Steem.DAO and 60% as interest. I personally do not like this idea but at the moment the rewards is not adding sufficient value to cover the supply of Steem/ inflation that it costs. This will at least give the best content creators a chance to gain exposure. Vote selling and self-voting will no longer offer financial gain.
There have been extensive discussions (think "secret Slack"). The truth is that the proposed changes to economics make sense for some but will negatively impact others (or so those others think).
In the end, like in the real world (I see parallels with politics between Member States in the EU), there is no majority consensus to implement these changes.
You need to take into consideration the fact that steem is about more than the "content creation and curation" - so the alignment of interests is not necessarily 100%
"Stop dreaming", that's my message. It won't happen, forget about it, it will not get done. Go through the 7 stages of grief. Then read the proposal again, with a fresh eye :-)