The excuse they have used for not regulating content is that it is subjective and it is! So, while I acknowledge the challenge the idea that it is impossible for them to do a bit of curation is just silly.
I think it would be okay for each bidbot to come up with their own standards... Such as no sharing links or add some words with that photo.
Or they could remove a vote a round for subjective low quality.
As consumers we could support and use the ones that came up with excellent standards.
Yeah, I agree, it's hard to make the argument that there's one correct kind of content to boost. I've seen a few curation/upvote services like @qurator that have some fairly objective vetting standards (post length, technical writing quality, citations) for new members, and that seems like a good start, at least.
I'm totally with you, though, on letting bots and services set their own standards and then allowing the community to "vote" on them with their wallets and SP. I'm still thinking a bit about which curation projects I want to support with my relatively small amount of STEEM and SP--but I definitely want to do some donation/delegation.
Keep in mind bidbots have not been banned but they are being monitored. I don't hate the bots, but I still look at the steembottracker every day to decide what to downvote.
I don't mind if it seems like someone is actually trying to promote content for visibility. However, it is pretty clear when people are using them just to try to farm some steem.
They promote old posts, there is little engagement, they post in non-English, because there is less curation.
The accounts don't interact or engage, because they want to fly under the radar not be discovered...
Everyone has their own standards and that is okay, but the bidbots got abused for so long they are tainted with the reputation they earned for themselves. I'd use them with extreme caution for now.
Thanks, that's good advice. I hadn't heard of the steambottracker, but I'm gonna go check it out. And it's a good point that bidbots are totally within Steemit's terms of service, which is something I had in mind when I wrote this post, and should have mentioned.
I think it's totally appropriate to try to combat bidbot abuse and reward farming with downvotes. But I think you're right that there's a lot of bidbot hate out there (based on what I've been reading), and that does make using bots and upvote services risky in a way that I hadn't thought of.
I wonder if we're going to start seeing bots that downvote posts that have used bidbots automatically?