[Op-Ed] How curation guilds have turned voting behaviour on its head.

A few months ago, a handful of authors were voted on by whales over and over again, and bots and humans alike participated in a race to front run whales. In short, votes kept on piling over the same authors repeatedly.

Around this time, curation guilds started to form. It all started with Team Smooth, followed up by RobinHood Whale. Next came Curie and Steem Guild - operating at full capacity to this very day. Finally, we have a successful new concept in SteemTrail. The curation scene on Steemit is vastly different to what it was just three months ago.

@furion had an insightful post three months ago about how Curie even in its very early days had massively lengthened the tail. Since then the above mentioned initiatives have further cemented a more balanced distribution, now almost perfectly lining up with Zipf's law. @ontofractal has some interesting metrics that highlight this.

Of course, there are still some accounts like @steemsports and @curie which attract swarms of bots, but the days of front running whales on a select few accounts are largely gone.

Instead, bots and humans alike are focusing on something that was completely unthinkable a mere couple of months back - they are targeting new authors and posts which have earned as little as possible!

Successful botmasters like @laonie have had to improvise. We have seen Project Better - their goals are pretty simply to vote on posts which have very little rewards generated, yet some minnow votes. @biophil has an even more sophisticated bot along similar lines, seeking out new authors.

Today, these are the bots that are most successful. Because there are actually curators out there looking out for good content, and voting power support to follow up on this curation.

Of course, more bots are latching on to these more successful bots. At the end of the day, we now have exactly the same bot swarms spreading their votes across a couple of hundred different authors every day, rather than a dozen or two.

The message is clear, the message is simple. Whether you are a human curator or a bot curator - vote on good content, vote on new authors. Vote on posts that few have voted on. This is by far the most profitable way to earn curation rewards.

If you are concerned about the bots - you can beat them. Look for posts which are great, but no one has voted on them. Preferably from authors few have voted on before. The bots won't pick them up, but it is likely a curation guild will.