RE: Rethinking The Position of Upvote Bots in the Steem Ecosystem (without SMTs)
Well you are very much right. But you have to wonder that why minnows resort to bots' upvotes in the first place?
Because they are a neglected community here. If we all want to end the role of upvote bots then whales and other senior members need to curate minnow's posts so that they know that someone is actually reading their content.
I, for one, resorted to an upvote bot, after i saw that my posts were being seen by only 4-5 people. I mean it took me like 2 hours to compile that post and only 5 people saw that.
Seeing a bad content and then deciding not to upvote is a seperate thing. But at least someone should be seeing it.
Hence i turned to an upvoting bot in hopes that when people will see few dollars on my post, they will read it, and they actually did.. views went from 5 to 64 in no time..
I agree with you that bots are destroying steemit ecosystem but unless steemit ensures that some people are curating and duly rewarding minnows, i am afraid this practice will continue..
@jbn well said ... at times I have had the same experience
Glad to see i am not alone in this..
Thanks for your comment, @jbn.
This is an inherent problem of the floodgates of the Internet. The Internet has always relied on curators. Yahoo! initially was a directory of sites. There was DMOZ also as an influential player around century turn. Then there are the manual curators, people like Jason Kottke, John Gruber (Daring Fireball), Andy Baio (waxy.org), and many more.
When search engines became the more prevalent Curators, we also saw initiatives like Digg and Reddit come to the fore, at heart popular content discovery platforms. Upvoting platforms.
All of these have constantly been gamified. It took Google years to improve its search results and get rid of low quality, or even spam, in it. Even to this day Google is constantly being gamified. SEO is a very lucrative business, and an expensive one at that for its customers.