Recently, ferment over paid upvotes, self votes, and bots has increased to a fever pitch, as the concentration of wealth on Steemit has increased to unprecedented levels. Steemit's GINI, a ratio of the wealthy to the not wealthy, of wealth disparity, is worse than any nation on Earth, and continues to get worse.
@denmarkguy's epiphany and his post regarding the difference between curation and promotion is the direct cause of my post.
Curation rewards are a primary vehicle for substantial stakeholders to profit from their stakes. Another is selling their upvotes, directly, as @snowflake has discussed forthrightly (thanks for your integrity!), via delegation (typically used to fund votebots, selfvote, or sell votes directly), or directly funding votebots. Examples of these latter methods abound.
Curation is the practice of upvoting quality posts. Since this is the mechanism which causes quality content to increase relative to shitposts, it is the essential mechanism that drives price appreciation in Steem.
Promotion is paying to be seen, advertising. It does not improve quality, and does not increase the price of Steem. There is also the rise of paid flaggots. @bloom openly describes himself as a 'professional flagger' on his about me blurb. This is simply paid censorship, and downvotes applied to posts and comments that are not demonstrably to prevent spam, scams, and plagiarism, all are propaganda, and censorship, and I encourage a discussion about how to handle censorship and propaganda to begin on Steemit.
Paying for upvotes is advertising, not curation. Since it is impossible to differentiate between paid automated upvotes and pro bono automated upvotes, and they have identical affect on quality, all automated upvotes are advertising, as are all paid and self votes simply promotion. Neither any paid vote, nor any automated vote, nor any self vote, is curation.
Promotion is not curation. Curation rewards are not applicable to automated, self, or paid upvotes. Propaganda and censorship need to be precluded if free speech is to survive on Steemit. Bullshit about 'returning rewards to the pool' is just that: bullshit, @berniesanders (I'm tagging you here not to draw your flag, but because I value your thoughts. I want to hear what you have to say, and I believe you are competent to say it without silencing me. If not, you speak louder about your own confidence in your position than mine).
All posts, including comments, promoted via automated, self, and paid upvotes belong in the 'Promoted' feed, and nowhere else. Authors who flag promoted comments to $0 should be eligible to leave the promoted feed.
This Saturday, December 9th, 2017, a Steem panel will discuss matters which include these. I strongly encourage all Steemers with an opinion on these matters to attend. Participants will include influential Steemers, like @aggroed, @jesta, @timcliff, @blocktrades, @pharesim, @lukestokes, @elear, and @andrarchy
Lastly, for those of you that want bots gone, there is a way this can be done, that I only discovered yesterday, after long contemplation and many questions. @leotrap proposed a method of doing so on @blocktrades recent post on changing curation rewards to improve the profitability of curation, which you can read here.
It is claimed that captchas don't work, and there is certainly some truth to that. However they are proved to dramatically decrease bots, spam, and undesirable automated content, and are widely, and effectively, used across the internet.
Let me know what you think of these ideas: relegating advertising to the promoted feed, killing all bots, and preventing censorship and propaganda on Steemit.
Thanks!
