Steem is back on 24 hour rounds and fighting off bots effectively

This is about the Steem developement hardfork number 13, my lucky number. And therefore SteemIt posts will have 24 hours rounds again, or payout in the 25 hour after posting, if you like. To my opinion that is better because then every post counts for the whole planet. The hardfork went live on monday 15th of august 2016. Also addressing some other issues.

You might have noticed some changes in the text 'payout', it now is know as 'potential payout', a site update, done before the Steem hardfork. One major change is that there is a minimal threshold for curations to count. In effect meaning that low powered 'mass' voters have no effect in the potential payout buildup proces. This is done so meaningless and bad programmed 'copy-paste-vote-reply' spam bots can be stopped effectively. Because often they are used by accounts that have no meaningfull Steem Power. And in this manor they would not be able to gain any by trying to trick the system, creating a lot of useless content and curation in the process. Bad in many ways...

What would this have for an effect on new users? Or those with VESTS, Steem Power, below the threshold? And what happens if those 'get-rich-quick' bot owners buy just enough Steem to Power Up, just over the treshold limit? If you have any thoughts on that, please let me know in a reply.

And mining got repared

Then there is the fix that makes it impossible to trick the mining system. Some effect that SteemIt users, like me, might not even have noticed. But at one point it seemed possible to skip the complex math done by a 'miner' and this was taken advantage off. Luckily that got fixed with the new Steem release.

Now I do understand that it is in everybody's interest to keep spam to a minimum, to keep scammers out and to create a platform that prefers original human created content. The latter one may sound easy, logical even, but in day to day practise it might be difficult to notice what is real fresh original content, human made. And there are some human behaviour factors to consider that could help build a good filtering system.

We can only read a certain amount of words per minute, on average. So we can only digest a certain amount of posts per day. And this is also limiting our maximum amount of replies we can make. Also the amount of posts we can make on a daily base does have its limits. Humans tend to need some sleep, some time to eat etcetera. This knowledge could help to proof true human activity on SteemIt and filter bots out. But, then those bad bot programming crooks could use timers for different bots, to mimic human behaviour. And share it again for others to copy-paste with little or no effort to it.

And even though the curating threshold might seem a good idea, even with a possible downside for new Steemers, or ones with no score yet, it might not be enough to stop the spamming copy-paste bots. It is a pitty that these kind of measures need to be applied, in order to keep Steem going. But it is a part of the SteemIt reality.

Hopefully there is a certain way in the nearby future to automaticly notice if an account is spamming copy-paste bot driven, or used by a real breathing human being. One that creates fresh new original content on a regular base. And I guess it would help if Steemers would think about what they curate and reply to, cause after all, it is in their own interest that spamming copy-paste bots are ruled out.

Any thoughts on this subject? Feel free to share them in a reply. Also, if you are convinced that I made a wrong assumption about the changed threshold 'curation system', then please let me know. Always willing to learn more.