RE: The Bane of Bidbots ... An Intelligent & Civil Discourse
Well... all I have to say is that this trend to no governance and no need for rules apart from the rules set by the code is an interesting and failed experiment. It relies too much on good and virtuous actors, and really expects too much of the community to police themselves.
Two cases, I found a post that plagarised my own content. I only found it by sheer luck, and it would have paid out for the plagariser if I didn't report it to @steemcleaners. Why is it own my shoulders to find this bad behaviour? Even after reporting, one of the big account votes acknowledged the plagiarism and did NOT remove their vote. I also saw some guy keep reposting BEATLES music and getting a huge upvote from a music community... I'm sure that that guy didn't write that stuff... even after reporting, they still got automated huge upvotes...
Speaking for myself... I consider myself a fairly good person.... I know using bidbots is not really great community minded behaviour... however, I use them. I have liquid SBD/STEEM and it the best way to convert it into SP whilst getting a return. Even if I played the crypto market, with much greater risk, I only get a smaller return... So, on that topic, I'm in a glass house...
The sheer fact is that no rules means the big boys win... it isn't a surprise, but sometimes idealism trumps logic.
@bengy,
And there's the rub ... the community is not even trying to police itself. Click on this post
https://steemit.com/steemit/@quillfire/central-premise-and-proposals-a-series-about-fixing-steemit-part-4
... and look at the comments section. This is how Witnesses react to the suggestion of a few common sense Rules of Conduct and a mechanism for their enforcement. Almost everyone else (scroll down beneath the mutually upvoted Witness comments) thought they were good ideas. There's not a week that goes by that I don't get DM's about them ... 5 months after-the-fact. And it's picked up lately.
As I written on numerous occasions, I don't blame anyone for starting/using bidbots as I consider them a logical adaptation to a hostile environment (addressed at length in the hyperlinked post). So use bidbots ... or fix the environment. I argue for the latter.
In the short-term, you're right. In the long-term, no corrupted system survives. EVER. Corruption, in all its forms, creates extremely destructive negative feedback loops. Venezuela is sitting on the world's largest proven oil reserves ... and yet the country, riddled with corruption, is on the verge of complete collapse.
Even if people don't want to reform Steemit for moral reasons, they ought to do it for pragmatic ones.
BTW ... scroll through these comments ... this post has hit a vein of IQ that possesses the ability to articulate itself.
Quill