RE: Where Are All The Voters? Why Manual Curation Is Going Away..
Thanks for bringing up such an important topic. I really enjoyed reading your “rant” and getting your perspective on the topic. Even though I personally choose not to use any kind of vote buying service or bot, I tend to adopt more of a “freedom of choice” mindset. My value structure centers around the idea that people should be free to do what they want, as long as they are not harming someone else. I guess there could be an argument that people using vote buying services are draining the reward pool or not allowing space on the trending page for content that actually earned a place there…but I’m not sure I’d consider that “harm”. It’s a tough line to be honest.
One “myth” around using voting bots is that by hitting the trending page, you will gain more votes, followers and have further success on the platform. This may happen, but I honestly don’t think it is a good long term strategy. Many whales and dolphins with significant voting power are looking for consistent, quality content creators that they can support. If they run across your blog and like your content, but see that you self-promote all of your own content to oblivion – I honestly think that is a turn off for many of them. I could be wrong, and I would LOVE to get your thoughts on that – but it seems like if you want to attract high level votes from big users, using voting bots may actually DECREASE the likelihood that will happen.
Here's my issue with Steemit. Not everyone has the capital to achieve high SP. The problem is that whales don't manually curate since its easier to sell votes to bots.
Having 1000SP earned barely gives a $0.20 vote. That's the issue. We have too many new users with sub 500 SP so there's not much to go around. What does go around only goes to vote bots. 1000SP should give at least a $1 upvote at full power. This way minnows can upvote meaningful content. All I see are the same individuals in the hot and trending tabs that self vote since they dropped $5000 back when Steem was under a penny and have ridiculous amounts of SP.
Based on my own observations, even with a sizable amount of 1200 followers, I rarely get more than 10 views. This is a large discrepancy from what you'd expect from such a large amount of followers. I feel that people buy votes in order to get to the trending pages so that they're seen by hundreds of thousands of Steemians and in return gain more votes and followers. However, the big drawback is along the lines of what you stated regarding Whales wanting quality content. From my findings, buying upvotes of less than say 30SBD will rarely get you any other votes.
When it comes to buying upvotes, it's either pay enough to hit trending, or be forgotten. It's all in the way that Steemit has been set up. We need tighter communities where people will actually view the hashtags that are tagged, rather than just clicking the hot and trending tabs. I doubt too many people even view the new tab since half of it is spam.
In my opinion, SP needs to yield more rewards so that the new users can have meaningful votes. $0.20 for 1000SP at full voting power is too little. If the rewards were payed at a higher rate for lower SP users, it would dramatically change manual curation and the amount of content. As it stands, most of these high SP holders just sell their votes since its a passive income without ever having to even log on to Steemit. Why would they manually curate if they have 100,000 SP? Just sell the votes and make a sizable income.
Granted, not everyone is like this - I've seen plenty of high SP holders voting for all sorts of great content. My only observation is that since joining this site in October, the amount of voting bots has increased exponentially and the amount of manual curation has gone down dramatically.
Sorry for the long reply!