I have seen so many posts with low to mediocre quality getting upvoted by tons of bots bringing down the quality of the platform to the eyes of the people coming through this platform.
To be fair, I have seen many (subjectively) low-quality posts being voted by human curators to the top of the trending page. So it's not exclusively a bot problem.
Nevertheless, I still have a tough time believing that a bot could attribute due quality to poetic writings and literary styles making use of parables, myths, poetry itself.
Of course not. The current curation bots can't judge the value of content in any humanly subjective way. But that's not their purpose. Their purpose is likely one of two objectives: to predict where the most value can be gained among existing posts and to vote on those, or to simply vote for specific authors and/or to vote at a specific time on a given post. Either one consists of a human element in programming them and they both perform work for the platform. So in that sense, the curation is being done and is helping to achieve the goal of linking content/pages.
In my opinion, the far bigger issue is the human voting with larger stake - and attempts to distribute for the sake of distribution or to hand out rewards based on "consistent effort" rather than actual evaluation on post quality or potential popularity. In that regard, I would disagree with you on the necessity of guilds. If you missed my post last Friday (don't remember if you commented or not), it was about this very topic.
Yet, this new way of doing business also allows for the higher stake holders to still have a decent amount of leverage over the curation as well, which I found in itself very healthy as it tends to naturally promote quality and sustainability of the platform as well.
I pretty much agree, although I'd actually prefer to see less involvement from so many whales trying to "distribute" rewards. There's an argument to be made that the less the whales get involved with voting, the more influence all other users will have. The trending pages would likely be vastly different from day to day if the voting was done entirely by the smaller stakeholders. It may even allow for actual and organic popularity to emerge among the user base. I realize that this will likely never happen - and I don't have any particular reason why it should happen - but it would certainly be an interesting experiment to say the least.
Thanks again for a fantastic write up, dedication to quality, sustainability and a very healthy virtual platform.
Well, thank you very much!