It is not good. People are boosting terrible content, which will never gain an audience. Therefore, there are only two outcomes:
(1) The account stops receiving votes as soon as the vote buying is over
or
(2) The user buys votes forever
There's no magical "(3) Everybody falls in love with the terrible content" lol, so I'm not sure what the users are expecting in the long-term. Most likely they have no long term plan at all.
See, I should just have said it as plainly as you did.
People are boosting terrible content. It is the kind of content that sits not deserve a decent reward. It is not that it is being overlooked and us amazing but it is just mediocre. That is what newcomers will get to see now when they arrive
I think it's awful and the folk will end up buying votes forever leaving them perpetually in real to the vote buying services
And therein lies the whole ball of wax. The constant clamoring for attention-- be it from vote begging, from self-upvoting, from buying votes and resteems all "stink" of short term (desperration?) thinking to me.
It also stinks of a category of users I am only too familiar with (from many years of dealing with "rewards-for-content" sites) whom I'll loosely classify as the *"I Click Links On The Web To Make Money Online" crowd. They could care less whether we're a blogging site, an ad factory, a gravel pit or anything else... the ONLY thing they care about is milking whatever "system" they are part of for every fraction of a cent they can get out of it. They tend to be very, very greedy, very very short sighted and not very bright. Which, of course, those with money can easily exploit.
"Spend 10 SBD to get a $15 upvote, which will decline to $12 by payout time, of which you only REALLY get $9 because the rest goes to curation. So you LOSE $1 net, and the only person to GAIN is the seller of the upvote who's $10 richer. Have a nice day!"
Ya this is the worst part! Many people are simply looking for the easiest path to money. No exceptions, no logic. If you tell them that they can earn 10 cents per day to click a button on a blank page, they will do it.
There is some perspective to be had here - for some people, they may be living in very economically depressed countries. If the average living wage in your town in $2, then earning $0.50 from an upvote bot scheme might actually be a great use of your time.
From a first-world perspective, it seems like insanity. But I try to stay open-minded. The best we can do is to help people see the bigger opportunities - if they realize that $10/day from a good steemit blog is completely possible, they may be open to trying different/better tactics.
@heymattsokol, I try to stay open-minded, as well.
Experience tells me some of it may be cultural, as well. How come people in the Nigerian community seem able to figure out that good content will eventually earn good returns, while users in certain parts of SE Asia "default" to spamming, plagiarism and gaming the system?
Maybe it's in the approach... do you see Steemit as an "opportunity" (i.e. a windfall you would not otherwise have had) or as a "job" (setting up the dynamic that you are entitled/obligated to "get" something)?
How do we counter this in such a way that quality is rewarded? You and I both belong to an initiative that upvotes, BUT our memberships are "by invitation" and heavily vetted and very selective, on top of that-- merit based.
I'm not sure if there is a "big-picture" solution - there probably isn't some change to steem's rules or code that will fix it. For me it seems more like a problem to address one step at a time, from the ground up, with grassroots initiatives.
Depends on our status here too. For me - I have a lot of respect here, as my rep of 67 / 1,400+ followers indicates. But I don't have much money - I'm very poor, with only 2,500 of SP to vote with. So for me, I've focused on the community side - and as a result, now I'm able to use other user's money (via OCD and Curie) to support great posts.
For you it could be different. I think we each need to find our own best contribution. For example Ned shouldn't be spending his time curating posts - he has bigger fish to fry. And a new new user, reputation 25, shouldn't do much of that either. They should focus on content creation and meeting people.
It's all relative and there are no perfect answers, lol
edit: Also - there have been a lot of good conversations about this lately. I might make a "MEGATHREAD" soon where we can talk about it as a group... will invite you if that happens. :-)
Yup, perfect answers are in short supply, for sure. I keep hoping that the "communities" feature-- whenever they finally get it released-- will help filter some of all this.
And yes, everyone has their own gig... I'm trying to build this account "organically" as a venture to support art and artists and it is slow going, but I am patient... again, building a community, but keeping it somewhat "niche" specific to art and artists.
I'd appreciate a heads-up if you do create a discussion about all of this!
Rewards don't actually just decline by payout - they decline when the Steem price falls. MinnowBooster is so popular because it is profitable, not because it's not. Having said that the voting power is wrecked now from this new policy and I doubt it would be profitable now.
Seriously though, compare that to voting bots that just straight up aren't profitable, that are unashamedly fleecing the customer. That's before you even talk about curation or Steem doing what it always does.
And actually you want to know the real problem with Steem ... HUGE stakeholders dumping STEEM on the market 365 days a year ... these conversations don't happen when STEEM price is high ... when it's low, things get vicious ... That 3.5 mil MinnowBooster has is 3.5 mil that isn't being dumped. There's people on here blabbing on about how they care about the ecosystem literally dumping 80K on the market every few days ... I mean I know they need that gold flaked caviar with coke on the side, but sheeeeeeeiiiit