RE: Why there are so many fake accounts and abusers?
Totally agree, only the quality and interest of the content should determine the amount of money the author earned. The problem is that spammers find ways to earn a few cents for their poor quality post. If they didn't earn anything, then they would get sick of spamming.
Yes, Steemit needs to review its guaranteed votes policy. Not because this policy is bad, but because it is the cause of fraud.
Unfortunately, Steemit does not have an effective mechanism for checking content for plagiarism, determining the quality of a post, or determining the presence of other fraudulent activities. There is no penalty mechanism for fraudulent actions. There should be such a mechanism, because we are people, and people tend to choose the easier way, even if it is not fair.
The softest action in my opinion is to show authors that they can make really good money for a really interesting post. That's exactly what the SC01 does. But it should be done by the community.
Imagine a novice, a writer from God. He wrote the first post which is very cool. Somehow he was noticed by SC01 and supported. The writer saw that he received a decent reward for his high-quality work and wrote a second, even better post. This time SC01 did not support him and the post received a few cents. The same happened with the third post.
Writing the fourth post, the writer will think: "Why should I waste 4 hours and a lot of energy, I will finish this post faster, for a reward of 1 dollar it will be enough."
The whole reason is that the readership of the entire Steemit is too weak and cannot adequately reward quality content. Everyone hopes for one SC01.
In this case, quick changes are impossible. It is necessary for each of us to become a curator of quality content. Or we need some big investors to create manual curation accounts.
I was very proud of our ex-curation team (IAT). We always voted according to the content of a post. Clubs were mandatory to get a vote of course, but we never over-voted something just because the author belonged to club100.
As I said, all projects that were created with the good intention of supporting as many quality authors are now misused by spammers. Probably, we didn't deserve this support from the team. :(
Catching fraudulent activities is so tiring. I had some other activities that needed my attention but I had to spend the whole weekend tracking a long list of abusers. I managed to wipe a lot of mess but still, there's a lot to do. I could have spent that time helping a newbie (two people were actually waiting for some guidelines by me). I really wish there was some automatic mechanism for user verification and for catching plagiarists.
The latter seems a little difficult. But we can surely work on the former suggestion. (:
I doubt it!
Readership is only too keen on high rewards. If everyone used their SP to curate other good posts and write posts for other readers, the readership would be very strong!
And here we again come to the problem of delegating SP to bots.