There's an interesting dynamic that I've noticed on Steemit lately: bots are taking over curation.

Many Steemit users who have lots of Steem Power (aka whales) aren't manually curating content; they're instead letting a bot do it for them. Curation bots are identifying users who have made big payout posts in the past, and taking into consideration factors like the number of words, headers, pictures, and links to determine how to allocate upvotes.

There's one fundamental reason curation bots make sense for whales and it was covered broadly in @dantheman's recent post: Steem users are financially incentivized in the short-term to use bots for curation. Each user is allocated an amount of Steem power to use for upvoting and upvoting earns users curation rewards. For a minnow like me, I earn very little for curating so it's not worth it to implement a bot. But for whales, there's meaningful money to be earned. As an example, in the past 7 days a whale named @smooth has made over $8K worth of Steem power from curation (see his curation rewards here).

Voting on posts via curation bots is literally free money for whales in the short-term. As a whale, you can simply turn the bot on, let it do its thing and earn money. If you're a Steem whale who is not upvoting, you're missing the opportunity to earn more Steem power.

The problem

You may notice users that, as a result of being identified by whale curation bots as "high potential users", consistently earn significant money for posts. I recently came across @sean-king's feed and he earned over $1K for posting simple photos. Even I (a minnow who's had a few $1K+ posts) can make a few dollars per post currently, thanks to the fact that I somehow got identified by a few whale bots. I tested with a simple photo yesterday from my view in Sardinia (see here. By the time you're reading this, there's a good chance that @hr1 has upvoted by now :)

An obvious potential problem here is that we could see the quality of content stagnate or degrade as a result of the whale curation bots recognizing bad content and missing good content. I'm skeptical of AI consistently rewarding good content on the level of a talented human anytime soon and the bots are clearly now missing good content like this in favor of basic photos of a random woman.

Is this really a bad thing?

There are two reasons the curation bot invasion may not be a bad thing:

1.) Whales may recognize that in the long-term curation bots destroy the value of their Steem power and so they turn the bots off.The beauty of participating in a social network that we all have an ownership stake in is that if we're financially motivated and have a long-term perspective, we're all likely to act in the best interest of the group.
2.) My assumption that bots will be bad at recognizing great content for the foreseeable future could be flawed. AI is progressing quickly. The OpenAI project is training a bot on Reddit currently and who know's how quickly things progress in the coming years. Maybe bots will get even better than humans at recognizing good content?

What do you think? Is the curation bot invasion on Steemit a bad thing or is it just a natural evolution of the platform?

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