"This type of behavior is when a whale creates a bot that simply up votes everything from reputable users regardless of quality. This kind of behavior can be countered by other whales only by pushing the author rewards toward 0."
Unfortunately we already know that some whales are doing this and their is no counterbalance with other whales downvoting such posts - it only happens very occasionally. Most of these posts are of decent quality but even if they were not I'm not sure most whales would flag them. It does seem to be improving though because we have seen less auto upvotes for plagiarising material but as long as whales use upvoting bots the risk of low quality material rising to the top remains.
"Voters that vote poorly will kill the platform. Voters who vote well will help the platform grow."
I agree with this which is why I think using voting bots in general should be a no-no. If the whales don't have time they could delegate their voting (if it is added to Steemit) and until then there will be greater voting power for everyone else when they don't vote. Nobody should get an automatic whale up-vote.
I think the negative voting aspect could work but as you say people will not like that. It would also be interesting to know how many minnows would be required to negate a single whale up-vote. I suspect it would be so many as to make it pointless.
I feel like there should be no downvote on this platform and that the flag should only be used in situations where people are copying and pasting content from outside sources. The fact of the matter is the Whales aren't hardly voting. If you look on CatchAWhale.com the entire first page of whales have voting power of usually 99% or 100%. I'm constantly engaging and voting and my voting power is usually between 60% and 80%. I'm not saying the curation reward should be increased but I have a feeling the whales are too busy or uninterested in spending the time engaging with the community like those who are new to the platform. This will cause the attrition level of good new content creators to be pretty extreme. I see it on YouTube all the time. People busting ass and then they quit because they can't be profitable. I'm not trying to sound like a Baby Back McBitch but if the whales don't vote and engage with the content creators then we are looking at a very long period of blogging for pocket change. It could cause Steemit to not reach escape velocity to get to Mars like I thought we were on all on board with.
That's why we need incentivized downvotes, otherwise that imbalance in voting pressure will always cause issues. Here's a possible implementation based on a concept similar to prediction markets.
I'm new to Steemit and was surprised to find that voting bots were allowed. If the idea is to promote quality content through community voting, then all voting should be by the people in the community. If automated voting is allowed in order to make money for an individual, that threatens the integrity of the system and the community.
It isn't that they are allowed, it is that they cannot be prevented.
It can't be prevented but the community can make it clear that it is considered bad behaviour. That can bring considerable pressure on people and help to create a change in attitude.
@thecryptofiend Not to mention many of us have been flagging most of the more annoying bots so much they've been cast off deep into the depths of the block chain. Due to their negative Rep, many of the more unpopular bots have never been seen again since the new rep system went into effect.
What kind of "considerable pressure" would make @wang decide to stop making ~$4.5k USD/week from his upvoting bot?
That has happened. There have been many debates about that.
In a prior life I worked in technology. I'm not sure how a bot could not be detected and removed. But more to your point, if the community could downvote voting bots that would help to equalize the voting and make things more fair. The only thing you'd need, aside from the mechanism, is the ability for the community to aware of this type of bot voting and take action.
I think that is a very difficult cop-out to make to just say
"I hope ethical behavior prevails"
this is the internet and placing a dollar value next to a post influences greed.
More on topic of a solution, should users be able to upvote their own posts? Should there be a master thread for unethical behavior? Or if we're embracing botting, should there be a whalebot to show off large unethical profit margins?