RE: Why Voting Bots Are Great for Steem
While I think the perspective makes sense on some level, there certainly are potential challenges, as you mentioned. For me, while Facebook does offer advertising, the recent scandal with regard to potential Russian government/propaganda advertising during the US election raises a major challenge. If people/organizations with dubious intent were to buy upvotes for their "unsavory" content, if might be tough to properly filter for that. And since currently each voting bot would be built by the user, not Steemit, then there is no direct disincentive (beyond personal beliefs) to try to curtail such behavior. If you choose to filter out upvote purchases from some individuals, then others will simply build bots to take advantage of that opportunity.
Understand that it's an "extreme" example, but if you are designing a game system, which Steemit basically is, then you need to plan for such scenarios.
At any rate, it's both an interesting opportunity and challenge.
If some posted ISIS jihad propaganda and then any vote bot up it then I believe this bot will be quickly put out of the game.
Next logical step for vote bot is smart content filtering. Lets do it!
That's what downvoting is for - so not only does Steem provide a better mechanism for advertising, but it also provides a mechanism for the community to choose what content should be trending and what shouldn't.
The whole point is that voting bots are not the cause of any of these issues. As you can see clearly with @haejin and @ranchorelaxo, a whale can easily get whatever posts they want on trending and control large portions of the reward pool and they don't need any voting bots to do it.
On the other hand regular users trying to make it here do need voting bots, so I think it's important that we encourage them.
Fair. Was actually having a conversation about how minnows and new users can gain some traction on a platform that's currently small enough to be manipulated by so few users. If we limited voting bots to users with under (XX) SP or filtered for minimum reputation, that might help.
Another way we discussed was following the recent Viner invasion to YouTube, the idea of creating an automated "voting ring" system that experienced Steemians could use to bolster their friends when bringing them onto the platform.
One complaint I've had about flagging though is that it costs SP to flag too, which could limit moderators abilities in some circumstances. But as a bit of a newbie myself, I'm still just ankles deep in all this.
I think it's important to be clear about what the problem is. Only then can we start talking about a solution. The problem, as I see it, and as do many others, is that Steem Power is poorly distributed and a very small number of accounts control the vast majority of it, and therefore have the vast majority of control over the entire system.
In that respect the voting bots actually help immensely - they give everyone the opportunity to utilize the voting power of those whale accounts. If all of the whales used their SP to run voting bots instead of using it to mess around with the reward pool as they see fit I think things would be a lot better.