Bidbots simply (always) destroy the idea of supporting high quality content because they simply don't care at all about what they upvote.
Many users then again also don't care about what they post because independently from their effort they get upvoted anyway as long as they pay the bidbot owner.
The platform gets more and more centralized in a sense that few players are accumulating money. The bidbot owners not only get paid but also receive curation rewards for their votes.
In the long term nobody benefits because the appearance when looked at from outside of the social network is that bad that new investors aren't interested to invest and buy the token. The value of the token decreases. The platform looks like a dessert full of automated bots and farmers.
Hive has many flaws and I got many downvotes for criticizing their top oligarchs ehm witnesses, but at least they were curbing the use of bidbots, which is one of the reasons why nowadays the HIVE price is much higher than the STEEM price.
And increasingly, Steemit becomes less of a blogging platform and more of an investment platform. STEEM becomes a cryptocurrency without its reason to exist in the first place. Potentially meaning that STEEM survives in some form, but not to underpin blogging like the HIVE has done.
My thoughts have certainly wandered a lot more since writing this post 🤔
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Yes, the 'funny' thing is, that instead to post one could then simply stake STEEM and earn money for staking! Then at least one wouldn't pretend to earn money for writing great posts and hadn't to pay a bidbot owner additionally - it would be clear then that STEEM was now a platform to earn interest for invested money.
My (serious) idea was that one could devide the rewards pool into two separated pools, so one had to decide to either stake one's STEEM (for a good interest rate but then without the ability to vote on posts) or to be in the author reawards pool where one would be able to (manually - no automatism allowed) vote on posts and earn money by writing own posts.
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It's a good idea. If people wish to have part investment / part blogging, then they can create 2 profiles. Unfortunately, I have no doubt that the scammers will find a way of ruining this idea too. Much like the farming accounts that exist (which reminds me of a job I need to do) and the circle-voting.
The "obvious" downside though is that I can't see how the ROI for staking STEEM will compare to the existing returns that UPVU returns.
It feels to me that for any solution to work, we either need UPVU's involvement / cooperation or regulation of UPVU via Steemit Inc.
Whether we'll get either is something that I don't feel particularly optimistic about.
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That's true: the platform is already that centralized that without the cooperation of @upvu and/or Steemit, Inc. there won't be any progress possible anymore.
Sad situation, and I personally tend to believe that there is no hope anymore (that's why I also have no more stake involved here, to be honest ...). Of course I hope to be proved wrong.
I have the impression that concerning HIVE there is a little bit more hope, as nowadays the Splinterlands community (which is rather decentralized due to so many different big stakeholders ) is already bigger (and altogether richer!) than the few Hive 'oligarchs' on top of the witness ranking.
The problem is: if Splinterlands investors would try to buy HIVE (they now own SPS and DEC, the in-game currencies) to get in control of the network, that would cause the HIVE price to rise dramatically so that in the end the 'oligarchs' benefited again ...
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