The current state of the Trending page is just a symptom of the actual problem.
At the moment users on Steem have a very high incentive to sell their votes. Selling votes almost generates the same rewards as selfvoting without the bad reputation or work.
It has been accepted and legitimized by the community.
The problem with vote selling is that undermines any curation efforts by the community and isn't regulated by the blockchain.
Atm around 30% of the generated rewards on Steem are being paid for. -> https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/how-much-sbd-and-steem-is-sent-to-the-voting-bots-per-day
It will only become worse and more and more people are going to sell their votes. Something has to be done on blockchain level to fix this. Soon 50% of the Steem Power will be sold and things will go downhill drastically. Curation will be reduced to a minimum. New users won't get rewarded anymore.
I was heavily criticized the last time I started a discussion about this. I am not going down that road again.
People will soon realize that the current trend with voting bots won't end well.
I agree with you about most of this. Everyone is entitled to their own views on the biggest problems and the root causes of the problems, and naturally even when people decide to take action (which is generally costly to the individual since there is little to no compensation for anti-abuse) they will concentrate on what they feel is the most serious and most readily solvable problems. @heimindanger has zeroed in on bid bots and that's okay, it is fair to say they are part of the problem.
Personally I believe the root cause is that the reward pool is vastly oversized for the ability of the community to generate real value-added contributions (of the kind which can and should be usefully rewarded). As a result there is a surplus of 'free money' that gets chased after by various zero-sum (really very negative sum, after considering the blockchain bloat that results) schemes such as bid bots. The surplus in turn caused by recent high speculative interest in both STEEM and SBD which has outstripped organic growth and delivery on scaling developments.
As such I have been supporting @burnpost to help reduce the price of SBD (which accounts for some of the oversized reward pool) toward $1 and also to return a portion of the reward pool to stakeholders via burning, with the amount return determined by voting (i.e. people can vote on how much excess funding there is which isn't being absorbed by rewarding true value-add; when there is more value-add and/or a smaller reward pool, then people can vote to burn less or not at all).
Is this something the backend of Hive is intended to solve? We management at steemSTEM are working on our own frontend that I hope, if time and funding permits, revolutionizes the way academic research gets published and accessed - and in the spirit of social media, reconnects science with the masses. If we and others can simply and quickly build our own Dscience or whatevers with ease, it'd lead to more 'usefully rewarded' content that would also bring investors' eyes toward the blockchain, so I'm pretty excited for the day when these things are easy to implement.
(2am, can't tell if I'm making any sense, soz)
Communities and the other improved features enabled by Hivemind may indeed help the community grow and create and curate more value.
Says the person who is rewarding trash & copy-paste memes with automated votes.
Those participation awards they hand out are just as detrimental to the platform as your paid votes.
You basically sell flags. If I publish a post, it gets bumped down and knocked out of contention by people who use the paid vote bots. It's the same as flagging my work, except your flags cost money.
So, I came here to be an independent artist and writer. Since junk memes and low quality posts can easily bump my work down, I'm left with two options: Leave; or cave in, use a middleman like you and lose my independence. I don't want to work for you, you never hired me. So, I suppose I have to leave like everyone else you folks are chasing away; and that's unfortunate.
They pay robots for "visibility" yet robots can't see and when they buy the vote, they are paying those who delegated SP so they can look away for a profit. How can that be called visibility? They got duped by advertisers and now they shoot themselves in the foot. The blind leading the blind.
Anyone who's for those bots and this system wants this place to fail. That's how I see it. I'm outta here.
Preach it brother. I’m no big content creator by any means. Just trying to find my place and nitch here on Steemit.
Bots were tempting at the start but I have a conscience and figured that isn’t right. Paying someone to get you upvotes. That’s like a presidential election. Dah ha ha ha
Bots will run new comers away at a rapid rate. Just watch and see
These folks don't understand the entertainment industry. It's worth billions of dollars. Steemit and everything else that runs on this blockchain now and into the future has the potential to grab on to a massive portion of those billions by allowing creators to be 100% independent. Book authors, podcasts, musicians, bloggers, vloggers, film producers, everything under the sun. Now what investor on the planet wouldn't want a piece of that pie?
Does a busker in the subway tunnel pay people to listen? That's the most basic, entry level form of the entertainment industry. The answer is no and everyone knows that except for these folks who don't understand the entertainment industry and assume the busker will start paying, after hundreds if not thousands of years of never paying. That's how much these folks don't understand what they're doing. If the buskers can't even scrape up a bit of change, nobody else going up the chain will be interested. People are already leaving because these folks selling the votes don't know what they're doing. Does a musician buy the seats and play in front of an empty house? No. So what are they trying to achieve here? Stupidity? Trying to win the Darwin Award? Sure seems like it.
“Does a musician buy the seats and play in front of an empty house? No”
This is exactly what these folks are doin. Steemit has had some big namers in YouTube coming over (&furiouspete123 and many others, first one to come to mind) to join D.tube. This is just a start of the huge wave I believe. Yet some probably look at the trending page and go wow that is neat, then leave. Great bloggers get overshadowed by a meme that used bidbots, a picture of some coffee with very minimal words typed. This is a huge problem for the future of Steemit.
Unfortuntiy when there is $$ involved greed takes over and morals and values get kicked to the curb. It’s all about getting that $$.
Greed? These folks are working so they can make thousands instead of millions. It's not greed. They just don't know what they're doing and those who buy the votes aren't the sharpest tools in the shed either.
The people using the bidbots are trying to get more $$ than they would without them. So it does have some greed behind it. Sharp or not they are still after that $$ so it is greed.
Great analogy. As a musician, producer and artist, this platform has so much potential. I see the bots as a major problem. It doesn't do much for my art if I have to buy all my votes. My goal is not only to make a living making my art, but also to gather larger amounts of people who love my music and art. I feel you 100% as an original content creator on Steemit. I haven't given up yet, but it is certainly discouraging. I'd still rather post here than to facefuck or instagarbage
Exactly.