RE: Has Steemit been slow lately? If so, why?
Interesting post Mike. Steemit seems to be at a pivot point. It needs to show some forward momentum. It needs to make some visible and appreciable changes to the interface.
And it needs to find ways to improve the rather dreadfully low retention rate. It is all very well pouring more and more new users into the bucket but if the great big hole in the bottom isn't fixed then the water level is never going to rise.
Take a look at the daily stats from @arcange.
Daily authors and posts has flatlined since mid-June. And comments are dropping rapidly. How can that be when total users are increasing so much??
The clue might be in the only other stat that is going up - Total Upvotes / Curation. Why might that be 😉
Do we need to call in The Terminator before the Skynet falls in on us and steemit is totally overrun by the bots 😎
I think your last point there is a key. So many people are figuring out how to create bots and/or self voting rings that these "New Users" are not really new at all. Or even users for that matter. Just a means to an end.
As long as this is a community that is relied on to police itself, there are too few @steemcleaners and @sherlockholmes to catch everyone gaming the system. The dev team supposedly has something up their sleeve according to @sneak, but as long as @ned is talking about SMT and not the platform itself, I don't know how much faith I have in their work on steemit.
I think you might be missing the part about how smt ties into new changes in the platform, also how much time it takes to curate. It may be that people are spending a lot more time curating than writing posts.
There are bots, but there is really only 1 good pay for upvote service, with a garunteed ROI @minnowbooster. If im wrong about that, show me the data. I don't see this army of bots.. I see a few new players... But not a significant number
The paid upvote bots are not necessarily what is being referred to as a bot here.
I think bots is a term being thrown around for any sort of automated vote. This would include streemian and steemvoter. People who are creating their own self voting steemvoter voting rings. The terminology is applied loosely.
But there are a ton more paid upvote bots per the way you are defining the them even than when I started, whether they are giving decent ROI or not is moot if we're simply referring to the "army of bots", find a partial list here: Steem Bot Tracker.
Per your definition of the term though, you are correct, we don't have an army of bots, we have a army of farm accounts coming in just to vote for each other and build up their SP in a way that harms the community.
I'd like to see the data. Sure people set each other on autovote, and it's based more on personal connection than manual curation of talent. I don't have a problem w that. If it's not spam, then it's mine to ignore. However, I'm open to believing in these things .. I'm sure a certain query would she'd some light on this, but I don't know which one