RE: Curation Bot’s - Race to the bottom - The Impending BOT Armageddon!!!
The more I look at this and experience it I must agree with thoughts that @dantheman came up the other day in one of his comments. It seems that curation is flawed in its roots. The idea is wonderful but the problem lies when you are rewarded to upvote something by not giving anything but time. Bots don't hive time in means that people have, so people or bots just upvote for profit not for right reasons (or maybe for both). If they were to give their money they wouldn't act in the way they do now.
To conclude any kind of curation reward will always lead to competition or outsmarting others for profit and not for primarily rewarding quality content.
At the same time curators are essential for this platform to survive because they are one content is made in first place.
I agree with a lot of what @dantheman has been posting too. Following and upvoting posts that bots upvote may help you make a little money, but it doesn't curate good content. There's an interesting thread about this elsewhere from last night by @stellabelle. I think you can still find it in Trending. We have a flood of new content coming in and it seems many minnows have given up on curation because there's no financial reward for them. The remaining people curating for profit can't keep up with the content. So a lot of good content is never discovered and promoted. I hope that the bots neutralize themselves, because honestly I don't think they add to identifying quality content. They also won't help in the growth of the steemit community. Great post Olllie.
I've read discussion @stellabelle too. I feel that 2 things are problematic. 1. human nature and greed, we can't fix that, but we can remove curation rewards. Lots of suggestions on @stellabelle post was constructive ways for minnows to take part in the community and earn money, to some extent like DASH finances its development.
Some revolutionary steps will have to be take place in order to satisfy all the appetites.
@leksimus I agree. With all of the users and content being added to steemit, curation is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. But some significant changes will have to be made to the curation function to motivate and reward curators to perform that function. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's good to see various discussions.