Alright, I get it, Stop - Using - Bidbots

So this is a post to let everyone know that I will refrain from using Bidbots

My posts got downvoted to hell on which I used some bidbots and I guess even the last person using bidbots to promote their posts has gotten into touch with the @trafalgar @ocd @callmedan etc. gang ;)

I still don't think that using bidbots for a couple of steem is necessarily a bad thing. Especially with the reward curve being changed, low post payouts will suffer much more in #newsteem. So I always thought that it was okay to upvote my posts a bit, but I respect that the community (meaning largely the most powerful stakeholders in Steem) want to change this.

Of course as steem being a decentralized platform (there are some arguments that it isn't), the community has to decide on what is seen as a legitimate practice. Sometimes I have the feeling that this process should be more transparent. For example, it would be useful if there was somewhere a list of rules on which should be followed. These rules would be voted on by the community ( a caveat being of course, that people with the most SP would have the most influence on which rules should be enacted, but perhaps that could be evened out?). So right now we have an interesting social experiment to see how a community engages with all of these problems to eventually (and perhaps not) reach an equilibrium...

With the lack of bidbots, organic curation can't be a bad thing, and in fact it is how steemit should optimally work (at least I think most people would agree on this). But this makes manual curation by the big fish all the more important, otherwise the rewards won't get distributed to a larger audience. This is why I like the idea of @tipu to let the community manually curate posts. It's unclear if this will be a model for other whales, we'll just have to wait and see...

So what can we do without bidbots? Of course the answer is to manually curate... But I think we should also be using services like @steemvoter or @steemauto to automate the process here. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands it is simply impossible to vote for your favorite authors and constantly browse thorugh /created. I think a lot of people on steemit don't realize that rewards come from automatic votes, i.e. following a curationtrail or being the receiver of such a trail. This is, in my opinion how most rewards are being distributed. Of course, there is the occasional upvote from @ocd or @curie, but you can't really count on those votes...

Let me know what you think about this! I would be happy for any replies 😊