Hi @jaguar.force,

It is evident that you have worked hard on your analysis and submission and have put serious thought into it. Content discovery and issues with it have been at the forefront of many debates in the Steem ecosystem.

Content discovery and its manipulation remains a frontend issue, mainly based on the fact that the Trending page serves as the landing page for Steemit.com and posts are ranked there based on their evaluation. Steps have been undertaken by Steemit Inc as of late to adjust this, including by adding 'Featured' posts. Other frontends have different ways of displaying posts, although most still take inspiration from the original.

Suggesting that an operator who runs a bid bot invest immense resources in creating a curation layer to the venture is unrealistic. Curation is, by the virtue of requiring regular manual input, very resource intensive. It requires the employment of whole teams of staff. I do see that you presented what can be viewed as a service plan for those bid bot services that find a blended bot and curation approach plausible.

Throughout your analysis you bring up important points that do contribute to the levels of abuse that we see, including the fact that many curators are not equipped to recognize abuse and that scammers have long sought to embed themselves within curation teams and communities in order to exploit them from within.

That being said, the anti-abuse Utopian category is not for posts that deal with protocol or service suggestions to 3rd party projects/frotneds.

A better way to contribute to the anti-abuse category would be to offer a modular approach to the content discovery question. Topics that relate to the discussion above and can functionally support abuse reduction may include:

• Advice to dapps/communities on how to initialize, organize and maintain blacklists and whitelists in relation to quality control and fairness and how to share them with anti-abuse projects
• Advice for curators regarding to what they should look for in a post that's free of abuse or ways to distinguish an account that's maliciously committing abuse/exploitation

Also, please be sure to always provide definitions for all terms and use standard terminology where possible. "Antiabuse operators" is a term that hasn't been used before to my knowledge and may be confusing to the readers.

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