RE: Curation Bot’s - Race to the Bottom - How it will Begin to Hurt Authors on ‘The List’..
Users who are lucky enough to be on the Curation Authors List, receive an upvote from certain bots, regardless of the content of they post.
This statement is incorrect; their is no such thing as The Curation Authors List. What you have is certain whales have built up individual preferred author lists.
Each one of those has a different criteria for what they vote and how they vote for it. So for instance; Wang used to vote for me; and now doesn't, because of what you mention above.
However, there are some whales who vote for some of my content over other types, this is because they have a personal preference for some of my content and don't rate the other stuff so much.
Which brings me onto my next point; you're assuming that every single bot out there is voting purely for profit. This is dangerously short-sighted thinking, you have to remember that some of these bots belong to people with millions of dollars in their Steemit wallets.
If this system is a success, they will get to cash out those millions of dollars; if it isn't, they won't.
Therefore, there are whales out there, who are trying to vote up the best content, and don't care about the peanuts they could make in comparisson by voting (peanuts to them of course).
So whilst your prediction may be right for some of the bots with a financial motivation; there are still people who are just looking to vote up quality, as this will see them realise their huge stake.
I have upvoted this post even though I don't agree in total, because you have a great delivery style and good analytical mind; and we need people like you :-)
Cg
Hello @cryptogee Thanks for your post. I certainly didn't make clear the fact that, users curate their own Author List, I was talking in general terms ('the list'), so thank you for clearing that up.
Your point is valid that not all bots are voting for profit. I personally think the majority are, however it is right to point this out. I think this will get more acute when/if delegated voting gets implemented. Users in it for the good of Steemit will delegate their voting rather than have a Bot IMO...
I have upvoted you for the same reason, however I agree with your post. I have certainly generalised these accounts into a single motivation group, for the purposes of my hypothesis. However I believe in the hypothesis regardless of the existence of Nobel Bot's.
I also don't think Bot's are bad. I'm exciting to see the evolution of the bots. They could be a very valuable indexing tool for Steemit moving forward.. They will improve and get more intelligent. Users will benefit because bots are not emotional. We will hopefully see a day in the future when bot's push the best content to the top of the trending list, and create a true meritocracy.
Idealistic I know. But we can all dream :)