A "Verified" icon on each user can help with the fight of bots and further good use cases.

Not all of the bots hinder Steemit in a negative way. There are certainly good ones with the recent bot I've encountered being cheetah. Cheetah censors Steemit by somehow matching your post to articles or content online and reporting them as plagiarized on your post if indeed it is.Here is a link to a recent article posted by the creator of cheetah, https://steemit.com/steemit/@anyx/cheetah-bot-the-fight-against-spam-and-plagiarism-continues . Weng is the best hospitality bot around and says hello to every individual who signs up on Steemit before anyone does. And he beat you to it, before you wrote that hello on that new Steemians post who just signed up.

We should keep these bots. They serve a good purpose. Not the ones that are causing rampage by posting on your posts without meaning. I mentioned in on of my articles that, these bots make Steemit feel like an artificial response website.

To my main point about this article, Youtube for example, has a verified icon that verifies each user and ensures that it's really them are can be trusted. Steemit has an #introduceyourself post where you introduce yourself, but most importantly, have a picture of yourself taken and holding some kind of note, with the days date written on there to verify that it's really you. This is great to prevent spam and bots taking advantage of the introduce yourself feed, among other reasons. This is one reason among many with regards to the use of the verification process.

Why don't we take the verification step a bit further and have a verification icon on each user. That way, we can quickly tell the difference between bots and users and expedite the downvoting process. Also I've mentioned in the past in some of my posts, that there should be some kind of punishment for people who're downvoted consistently "for the wrong reasons" and not good reasons, as definitely there will be people who will downvote even good posts. All this needs more complex thinking and code to really effectively justify downvotes on posts and the action to be taken.

I know the Steemit team are thinking and working hard on new features, better ways of discouraging some of these actions and i first of all thank each and everyone who's involved including the community at large for doing their part. I encourage you all to continue what you're doing.

Once justification has taken place, there should be some kind of strong ban to discourage and weaken these bad negative actions. We love this young community and don't want to encourage such practices. Bots rampantly posting everywhere can deter new users from signing up and discourage current users, further, potentially dragging them out. We don't want that.

Later on in the timeline of Steemit, I'm hopeful and positive we can find other uses cases for the verified icon. But this is a step I feel we can take now to making Steemit a great environment to be in. Please let me know your thoughts and thank you for reading.

Happy Steeming Everyone!