RE: Curation Trails, bad or good for the platform?
I'm generally pro-automation on this platform, but it can go wrong. Here's the scenario I've been toying with: say I build an epic greedy machine-learning bot that only chases curation rewards, and doesn't check posts for quality at all (hint: in the next few weeks, I may or may not deploy version 0.1 of this bot). This bot catches people's attention, and it starts attracting a following on Streemian of people who want curation rewards. After about a month, it has the reputation of being the most lucrative bot out there, and has several million SP following it.
Now, once I've established my bot with its followers, I can turn off my machine learning algorithm and start having my bot vote for whatever posts I want it to, because I know that whatever I vote for will go to Trending. Is this a good situation? It's basically given me the power to influence the face of the site. Of course, it all depends on my ability to get the bot working in the first place...
If people feel that power is misused and you shouldn't be able to influence it the way you are doing, then they will leave your trail and downvote the posts you have voted on outside of the promise you made it would be used in from the beginning.
Sure, some would. But if I had enough followers, I'd still be making good on my promise of making people money, so anybody who's following me for the curation rewards would stay. It would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Who knows if this is actually possible, but it's something to watch out for. It makes me want to pay closer attention to Streemian.