RE: Well, that escalated quickly: HF 21/22 and bidbots
Exactly. People want to see what they want to see, not what others tell them that they should see.
There's a reason why 0 popular social media sites and apps had any form of advertisement or paid promotion during the growth stage. Because it harms the user experience. All that stuff can wait until there is a mass adoption where being promoted is actually attractive because there are people who will see the stuff.
There are no ways to make bidbots work well with proof of brain and an inflation-based reward system that subsidizes the business by reimbursing the "customers". If you want to promote content then pay a UI or future community page to have your ad or announcement somewhere it makes sense, or even by burning STEEM. 1. Don't mix it in with the content-rating that is supposed to reflect the wisdom of the crowd. And 2. Don't have Steem pay back your promoters. That adds 0 value back.
You know what though? I had to step away for awhile. The absolute last thing I want to be doing these days is becoming frustrated again with the very same things I've been frustrated with for years. I had already said what I said up there, many times, over the years, plus so much more. Over the past while I had finally calmed down, got quiet, did my own thing, for the most part.
Everything you said, in my mind, is 100% accurate; truth.
What are we going to do though? I really don't want to spend another two years arguing with people. There must be something more productive but at the same time, problems can't be swept under the rug.
For so long, these issues have caused so much division. Everyone takes sides and all we do is bitch to one another. So there's another problem that we don't need. This doesn't need to happen again. I don't want to do this anymore.
If what you're doing isn't making you happy – do something else.
That is the stone cold, central axiom of life that everyone needs to live by and most people fail.
Now, there are real mechanical reasons that Trending is a steaming pile of crap and bid bots are inherent to the function of the Steem blockchain as designed. It falls out of the idea that all accounts are equal because determining the difference between a human making a decision about selling their vote or not and machine selling their vote or not is impossible. Ergo, there is a market in selling votes and influence. When there is a market in selling votes and influence, there is automation to optimize that market. When markets are optimized, often human interaction is only important in a greater, broader, strategic sense and the actual specific interactions are effectively meaningless.
Which is a really long-winded way of saying that the underlying proof of stake mechanism (and the fact that proof of brain is and always was a fiction) is the root of the problem, and as long as the root remains, the problem remains.
So what can you do?
Something else.
Determining what that "something else" is probably requires real careful thought about what it is that you want and that you want to achieve. Sometimes the things that we want our impossible so it doesn't matter what we do, they just aren't going to happen. Sometimes the things we want or only partially able to be accomplished. Sometimes the things we want are completely out of our control.
So what do you want? Odds are, if it's more involved, complicated, or limited than simply thinking of the Steem blockchain as a blogging platform, first and foremost, with no possibility of fiscal reimbursement for your work of creation, then what you've been doing is going to have to change. However, if you can shift what you want to just that, change the way that you frame what you're doing into what you are likely to get, then you can be not just satisfied but happy.
Therein lies the challenge.
I've given these things careful thought. Thoughts that evolved over time into something that would allow all of these things to work together and benefit everyone involved.
The reality is, mentioning these paid votes are a problem often gets converted into, "Ban paid votes!" But if they truly are meant to be a tool used for advertising purposes, I know there's demand and money to be made. But these systems only work when they're working together, like a team.
Actual content lures the eyes in, and those eyes might click ads. When they boost advertisements and dull announcements to the top, the actual content capable of creating a buzz is pushed aside. The act of placing the ads and paid programming on a trending page like this shrinks the potential market. How many businesses exist forever if every sale means they're just adding another bullet to their own foot they keep shooting? The more they do it, the less eyes and interest they'll get.
The proof was there for all to see. 20 posts and maybe ONE had a decent amount of engagement, when you remove the disingenuous comments left by members who've been misled to think the content was popular and the producer was wealthy (kissing butt and hoping for a vote someday). The real engagement was almost nonexistent. Nobody here can tell me they didn't see that. For years, people would say, "I don't look at the trending page." It was said so much one could have printed that line onto a shirt and sold thousands of units, while the one wearing it gets laughs at these community gatherings.
The business model eats itself to death. It can't scale up. The exact moment it becomes as successful as it possibly can is the same time it falls apart.
If this place was booming and 1000 people all wanted a top slot at the same time, your advertisement would get buried within seconds and whatever amount of rewards are placed next to the post would become the new starting point of ZERO. Everyone would blend back in to the crowd they were attempting to stand out from.
Now, on the other side of this world we have content producers. I can prove to you right now, as I have a post on the trending page that was pushed up there organically, how the paid votes will force me out and diminish my chances of receiving what are supposed to be the benefits of being there.
I will not purchase a vote to maintain that status. They're making a mess, and I'm not going to pay them to get out of the mess they're creating. I certainly don't mind getting bumped down by other organic content but that's not what's happening. And now to add insult to injury, people will assume my post is there because of bots and won't vote. The trending page has a bad reputation now, people haven't been able to trust it. Every content producer here hopes for that viral post. Now there's no real place for that. Unpopular by default.
I can't change any of this. The folks who made this mess will not even give my words one second of their attention. In the past, I've been told this is "whining."