About 8 months ago, it was estimated that around 35% of all votes made were purchased from bid-bots and other similar services.

So that probably hasn't helped organic growth too much as there are not as many larger accounts curating any more, and those that are usually have some 'free SP'.

Fckn preach it brother, I've been saying this type of thing for a long time. Ha ha, I got so bored of being ignored that I stopped bothering.

But fck all that, this is SPUD-DAY!

HAPPY SPUD-DAY 🙂

In regards to your analysis about slobberchops post and growth on steem in general. I couldn't agree more. I've only purchased about 1500 of my steem, and I haven't been the most successful in finding a decent circle to jerk in 😅... but that's just the nature of being inconsitent in discord community due to my ups and downs with illness.

The reality is that the large part of my organic growth has come from early days @curie votes and working pretty relentlessly curating for curie at that time as well. Them finders fees will soon add up!

Also, votes from promo-mentors when I ran a creative writing workshop in that community, ditto whaleshares when they were still on steem paid me in votes for running a segment on their show called literary corner.

Now, I'm pretty lucky to have support from curatorhulk, which I'm pretty sure is partly from the promotional stuff I do on twitter, as well as consistently keeping the content flow on my blog.

I do think that the move toward more dolphins is a good one long term as these people are much more likely to be active manually curating, which is what steem needs for growth of new users! If BTC and the crypto market in general takes off again, steem will rise with it. Then a tone of new users come in, ones who've left come back... curie vote worth more and you better believe I'm gonna get back to curating for them and manually curating the posts I find if the treatment I'm doing at the moment helps with this condition.

I think that virtuous cycle of reward for quality is possible, and the impact will be more with a wider spread of wealth on steem...

Ha ha, rant mode disengaged... only time will tell.