RE: Breaking a Natural Market On Steem
Actually, I haven't looked at the trending page since early last, so it looks much better today than I remember!
Anyway, yes... I think that if Steem flourishes as an economy (games, vote sellers, real life markets and other non blogging stuff) then there is a real viable use case which would have a reason for buying Steem. I guess we aren't there yet... But it is going in the right direction... Now that I think of it, I have won silver raffles with Steem! I guess this is where you were going with your post, that bidbots are also part of the natural economy and that new users would create the demand for Steem usage for things other than blogging purposes.
Anyway, when you talk abuse... Do you mean large account abuse? Or plagiarism and that sort of thing?
Both, Investors should use some portion of their stake to take action against something that would hurt the value of their investment.
I know it is arbitrary again, but personally, I try to use about 10 percent of my stake to fight "bad behavior". :)
Ah... I try to do the clean ups via reporting.. For an account my size, I too terrified of potential retribution... Most of the plagiarists are small... But you never know what is lurking behind.
Anyway, I was thinking about this recently... Most of the large curation accounts (both auto and human managed) are often too happy to give out upvotes... But when reporting is done, they just blacklist or remove the vote (if they do anything at all!). This creates a no loss incentive for scammers... I really wish that those big accounts would do something similar and save a flag of two for punishing verifiable bad behaviour that is exploiting their curation...
I wish everyone would take the risk to do a little clean up, just avoid the big scary accounts! :)