RE: Boosters -- Why They Are Bad For Steem and Steemit
I feel that this is the smallest of all the issues. Besides, boosters and upvote bots are crucial for the survival of the minnows and present an opportunity for their posts to be seen in the first place. Without them most users would have no chance of getting anything at all from their posts. I do agree though that the bot owners must incoporate a better mechanism to weed out the spammers.
The first and foremost major issue today is that low quality posts made by the same authors feature on the trending pages day after day, and week after week, for months. There seems to be no end to it, and it can stop only if the cartels and auto upvote bot owners who are behind upvoting these posts are confronted and dealt with.
If all the major content sites can do it, why can't Steemit constitute a team of curators who manually highlight the top 100 posts each day, out of all those that are trending so that at least the posts on the real trending page are genuine high quality posts?
Some positive action will mean that the owners and stakeholders of Steemit are indeed serious about it, and not just playing around with a beta for the fun of it.
Also, I think if Steemit as a community drives the upvoting of high quality content as a rule than a personal preference, things will change for the better.
Hey Maxabit,
You make some good points. You're definitely right that a lot of minnows are able to get early support from upvote bots whereas they may otherwise give up, or struggle. I'd argue that some of these users are actually shooting themselves in the foot though - the Curie project, for example, offers HUGE upvotes ($100+ at current rates) to minnows with great content - but people who use upvote services are generally not eligible for this support.
For me, curie was the most important part of my early steem career. If I'd used upvote bots, I would not have ever gotten curated by them.
You mention that you'd like to see the "top 100 posts per day" curated by professionals - Curie basically does that, except it's more like 10 per day, and get them onto the top trending pages for their categories.
Here's an example of a recent curie-supported post: https://steemit.com/music/@dimitrij/seine-concert-in-slovenia-third-tour-belgium-and-france
So - if you see what I mean, users actually do have access to what you are describing - but only if they do not use the upvote bots.
It's not a perfect system - but it may be worth it for you to consider an alternative view. Perhaps upvote bots, while they feel good in the short term, are actually circumventing the kind of quality curation that you hope to see on our platform.
You have stated these points very eloquently and I whole-heartedly concur.