RE: The end of an era - the last truly profitable vote-buying service dries up.
Lack of profitability is a good thing, but until delegation to these false curation bots declines, the problems with trending will remain. False curation keeps eroding the intrinsic value of the platform with early uncurated upvotes while real curation initiatives such as utopian are delaying upvotes to the last few hours, keeping that content out of trending. I think that if we want STEEM to grow, it should become socially unacceptable to delegate to false curation services of any kind. Especially now with G+ about to end, there is a lot of potential for growth that might need some new initiatives for delegation. I think with a lot of advocacy and community delegation G+ fugitives have the potential to boost the platform by growing the user base significantly and by bringing in new good content. False curation and more importantly funding of false currarion through delegation I believe goes 180 degrees against that potential.
At this point the bidbots are mostly improving Trending, and that's been true for a while now. While there's still some crap there, the decline in profitability is allowing notable projects – which actually benefit from the advertising – to get to the top and stay there more often.
"Organic Trending" is well-used elsewhere and has proven to be a process that leads to Kanye. It's not better.
I've been experimenting with some scripts that create an alt trending page, filtering out known bidbots, known delegator vote bots, self votes, votes by accounts linked through witnesses voting proxy settings and account recovery settings and votes part of an upvotes burst and clockwork votes. The result, a trending list more closely representing true curation looked a whole lot better than the real trending at each test I ran. I'm seriously considering an automated This is what Trending should have looked like this week weekly post. The idea that false curation, in whatever form, is in any way beneficial can easily be shown incorrect. We should be bidding for curation time, not for false curation. Get a real person in the loop.
Is this not what @ trufflepig does?
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