RE: I Don't Want to Write for Bots that Don't Consider Content. Response to @dantheman latest voting/curation post.
Careful now. Somebody's going to see your comment and just accuse you of being "jealous" of those making money. (I really do get sick of that rebuttal.)
I think your points are very spot-on. It isn't a problem that there are bots searching for "quality content." The problem is that the bots - especially those from the whales - are upvoting posts, regardless of the actual content. This is a problem because of the massive payouts of whale votes. This is what all of the defenders of the payouts refuse to acknowledge. It isn't just a problem because it's an actual problem, but it's a problem because of the perception of the platform, both internally and externally.
Writers and original content creators are getting frustrated with the system because it is blatantly abused by whales (when they upvote their own posts and comments knowing that they will give themselves a very large payout) and the whales/bots are the ones that are creating the trending topics. And these things are happening while really great writers are being drowned out by tons of noise - not getting money, but more importantly to most of us, not even being seen.
The problems are real, the perceptions of those problems are real, and real people who hoped that this would be a great platform are being discouraged. If these things are not addressed, this experiment will fail. I truly hope that the founders and developers take these issues seriously.
Yea, the jealousy accusations are there. And I'm sure there will be some that take it that way due to not reading through the post. To me this is a motivation and user connection issue versus money.
It reminds me somewhat of Manna by Marshall Brain where the reader is exposed to the workplace being run by a un-empathetic managerial software program. Regardless of the efficiency, I feel most people find they react and communicate differently when interacting with a human vs a machine/program.