RE: The Bane of Bidbots ... An Intelligent & Civil Discourse
It relies too much on good and virtuous actors, and really expects too much of the community to police themselves.
And there's the rub ... the community is not even trying to police itself. Click on this post
... and look at the comments section. This is how Witnesses react to the suggestion of a few common sense Rules of Conduct and a mechanism for their enforcement. Almost everyone else (scroll down beneath the mutually upvoted Witness comments) thought they were good ideas. There's not a week that goes by that I don't get DM's about them ... 5 months after-the-fact. And it's picked up lately.
Speaking for myself... I consider myself a fairly good person.... I know using bidbots is not really great community minded behaviour... however, I use them.
As I written on numerous occasions, I don't blame anyone for starting/using bidbots as I consider them a logical adaptation to a hostile environment (addressed at length in the hyperlinked post). So use bidbots ... or fix the environment. I argue for the latter.
The sheer fact is that no rules means the big boys win... it isn't a surprise, but sometimes idealism trumps logic.
In the short-term, you're right. In the long-term, no corrupted system survives. EVER. Corruption, in all its forms, creates extremely destructive negative feedback loops. Venezuela is sitting on the world's largest proven oil reserves ... and yet the country, riddled with corruption, is on the verge of complete collapse.
Even if people don't want to reform Steemit for moral reasons, they ought to do it for pragmatic ones.
BTW ... scroll through these comments ... this post has hit a vein of IQ that possesses the ability to articulate itself.
Quill