RE: I Don't Want to Write for Bots that Don't Consider Content. Response to @dantheman latest voting/curation post.
@sykochica Our minds are similar. I've said that before. We both have a tendency to be prolux. It's not a bad thing. It means we have a lot to say and we care enough to try and build a compelling argument instead of simply making assertions without a lot of thought.
The core of the problem we are facing with this whole bot thing is objectivity vs subjectivity. You can only have subjectivity if you "feel" something, and bots can't be made to feel anything (caveat: I have a way to do that, but it's a topic for researchers not steemit).
Anyways, curation is a subjective task, but there is so much to curate that you really do need a bot. Look at what you said about your feed filling up. And you're right you can't just expect folks to follow you if you don't follow them back. Not until you're prominent and neither you nor I are prominent yet.
So what you really want is a "smart feed". Something that can examine the kinds of things you normally like objectively and then make suggestions based on those criteria.
This is a task a bot CAN do and do well. It's exactly how netflix's "recommendations" engine works.
You don't just "want" a bot, you need a bot in order to give your time and attention to the very best of what your friends are putting out. Not everyone of us is going to hit a grandslam on every post and no one is going to produce content you are 100% interested in 100% of the time.
The ONLY difference between you and a whale in this regard is that the whale has massive influence and needs help deciding not only what to view, but what to upvote.
So the solution to this is to build bots for whales which use objective criteria which match the objective criteria the whales are using. (topic, voicing, and the SEO stuff you mentioned which really boils down to presentation)
And by the way @dantheman was wrong. Bots can examine content and style and make determinations about quality. It's been a solved problem in academia for years now. Just very few of us have the resources available to build and run something like that. Remember Isaac.Asimov ? That was actually a real thing he was doing and readability has a HUGE impact in how your posting is received.
But we can build bots that go WAY deeper than that. Just keep making content for your friends and remember that one of your friends is actually building these things and would never do anything to reduce your exposure. You're a great example of why I WANT to build these things!
The concept of a smart/filterable feed (which I first saw on @mor blog) would absolutely be a big help for Steemians of any scale, minnow to mega whale, for anything from personal interactions (posting, commenting, etc.) to curating.
In the US military bots are used for a wide variety of tasks, sometimes requiring some kind of munition (gun, missle, etc.) While these armed bots quickly handle the massive amount of information needed to navigate, detect and avoid potential collisions, there is ALWAYS a human in the loop that pulls the trigger.
Why?
Because they aren't comfortable giving the firing control over to something not human. There feeling is that the person that pulls that trigger NEEDS to be able to FEEL. Now I understand that the firing controls scenario is an extreme case, especially in comparison to a curators upvote.
This is where I think our views might differ @williambanks. To me by passing the act of curation entirely to a bot, even if designed by the curator themself, that the trigger is being pulled by something that doesn't FEEL.
(I understand that others may not feel the same way on this, it is just my personal view. Honestly I'd be curious how other felt on this.)
A compromise that I would feel much more comfortable with would be a bot filtering through and recommending a large number of posts (i.e. Netflix Movies), in various recommended categories (steemit, politics, etc..), from which the curator then chose the final selections. I would be much happier having a human, that does FEEL, in the loop.
[As an afterthought, the white paper stated a major goal to enhance conversation. With this in mind, there would be great benefit of either weighting comments heavier in the 'Hot' algorithm or adding a comments/time equivalent filter. While votes are important, typically the gold is in the comments.]