RE: The Truth About Guilds and Individuals (Illustrated!)
By the way, guild members don't vote on posts on individual whims.
Except their own posts, that they vote on as payment for their "services" often with much more strength than they use when they vote for the posts that they are allegedly curating.
As i said in HNIB's thread, curation guilds take money from authors of quality content by taking their curator paychecks out of the blogging reward pool. The reality of their operation is precisely the opposite of their stated goals.
The fact that they give back some scraps after making sure they're at the top of trending every single day, while it might ameliorate some of the damage is a footnote to their real purpose -- which is to line the pockets of the guild founders.
Who, just as a by the by, expect to be paid (and paid handsomely) for what every single other person on steemit does for free -- reading steemit and voting for quality content.
IMO, until you can come up with some model that doesnt involve the misuse of whale votes to fund low quality pretext content from "professional curators" youre going to see more and more opposition to projects like this.
Hopefully, people like ned (whos participation in abuse of this sort baffles me) will wise up and cut them off.
Then the argument here's simply a matter of:-
a) Not agreeing on the operational fees incurred of SG (On the flipside, I do hope that you think Curie's reasonable, as the goal has always been to make it a useful public utility of sorts that doesn't take too much of the daily pool). This is simply a matter of what is fair payment
b) Not agreeing that it's a service (since you've used "services" and "professional curators"). I think it's a legit service. It doesn't mean that one isn't providing a curation service if everybody else can also curate for free themselves. Just like babysitting. Just about anyone can babysit and even do it for free, but there are definitely "professional babysitters". I just think it's not very reasonable to just blanket it up and say that it's not "work".
c) Not agreeing on the nature of posts that are being self-upvoted. In this case, I can agree that quality of posts should really be considered before getting the self-upvote. Personally, I wouldn't do it on my own posts if I think they're not one of my best works (doesn't happen often for me). That said, I think the question now should be.. what if SG's self-upvotes are actually stuff that you greatly value?
What does this mean, and example?
I'm not trying to defend guilds blindly in anyway, but again, the word abuse here really depends on the 3 points above..