RE: A glimpse into a news bot network
"Bots or news bots in general are IMO also not the real problem here, even tough I personally would look for recent news more on dedicated news sites or maybe on twitter or reddit, not on steemit."
Could you explain why? As an Steemian this information is valuable. When I browse reddit worldnews, the posts contain only the link. So, first step to get people to visit some Steem app rather than reddit, is to have the links here. The discussion hopefully follows. We need Steem the blockchain to serve all kinds of needs. Not just bloggers. One could argue that there's minimal value added by these bots, but they're bringing the links here and I'd say that's worth something. The rest is up to curators to bring up the gems to the eyes of majority of users, just like in Reddit.
And we have to knowledge the fact that Steemit shows all posts, made through all other frontends/apps that live in the same blockchain. Maybe in future we'll have a Steem site just focused on sharing links.
Thanks for your comment! I think we have to distinguish between the steem blockchain and the interfaces/apps like steemit/busy/... like you say.
The blockchain enables all kind of content, and I agree to your points that it can do all that. That's what zappl/steepshot/dtube/utopian and others are doing right now. One might argue if a 75%/25% share of author/curator reward is appropriate for each type, but in principle this can all be handled with the same blockchain.
For the interfaces/apps the vast majority of posts currently come from steemit.com, the share from other apps is rather small (see my previous post if you're interested in numbers). I myself also mainly use steemit. On steemit all post types are (mostly) shown in the same way. I'm following a few hundred accounts that publish in a blog-like manner maybe once a day, mostly more infrequently. With high frequency news/link posts in between I simply would miss blog posts. That's the reason I'm currently not using steemit for news/links. This could indeed be handled with a separate app, but then the steemit feed becomes pretty crowded. I think steemit at some point has to adjust to different content types, maybe something like separate home feeds for different apps or categories, to remain usable as a generic steem interface.
Yes. A filter will be soon needed for Steemit.