RE: Auto up-voting is becoming a problem. Will it sort itself out over time?
From the perspective of someone who wrote an auto upvote bot ...
To be honest, I only created an auto upvote bot to get in on the early action of prime content producers as I cannot monitor Steemit 24 hours a day and maximize my curation rewards. I didn't have the time to write a notifier bot (kudos to clayops who did!), and I knew that this type of bot would be much quicker to put together (a few hours of coding and learning some python versus a few days for me to figure how to send alerts, as I haven't created those types of tools before).
Since I thought this tool was of value to me, even though I knew that it would reduce my own payouts to have others using an autovote bot and wasn't trying to keep the tool for myself, I put it out to the community for general consumption.
Frankly, I think that this is a useful tool until the July 4th payout. After that, I am unsure as to its effectiveness.
Basically, if I have read an author often enough and know that they statistically create good content (or what others deem to be good content for whatever reason), I want to be able to upvote them as soon as possible. This maximizes my rewards --- but only under the current schema with the rewards being paid out on July 4th.
In addition, I really only think that this particular mechanism is only beneficial until the 4th of July, and that afterwards, new types of algorithms will be developed that will identify whom are either content producers that have quality content or those who are likely to find good content before others.
This type of algorithmic development (which is beyond what Steemit is (currently) providing), combined with the potential for proxy autovoting and / or notifications, is a valuable service that would rely on statistically reliable data mining methods to predict the best content. How can you fault machine learning? Or those who want to build on that knowledge? Granted, an auto upvote bot is naive, but it is rudimentarily the same.
A user begins to recognize other users who both write content and upvote content, and then they want to be able to upvote similarly, and before some of the larger, account holders. A user employs the use of an auto upvote bot to achieve this, as opposed to using an algorithm to suggest to him what accounts to upvote.
I hope you didn't understand my post as an accusation. At least that is not my intention. Thanks for writing and sharing your bot. I'm trying to set up one, but haven't succeeded yet. I also stated that autovoting does bring some value to steem, like you also described, and that it is inevitable.
What I was trying to say is, that it looks like autovoting (the fact that autovoting will certainly happen, not specifically your bot) will skew the results, and in the worst case this will become a reciprocal autovoting circle, which in the end only harms everyone long-term. I was wanting to hear other's opinnions about the phenomenom, and if they see it as a potential problem. So thanks for your reply!
It's also true what you say about the first payout. Things will become much more dynamic after that, but maybe the good writers can still be identified. We'll see.
I didn't see it as an accusation at all. I just thought I'd share my thoughts on the matter. You have to assume people will act in their best interest (maybe I thought I would obtain more rewards by sharing the bot than not, for instance), and to be upset that they are using all the tools at their disposal to 'play the game,' so to speak, of a well-defined system is silly, especially if you're the creator of the game.