Hello Hive account@traciyork,

I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around this. So you're saying you'll help people "show off" their talents by having accounts blindly upvoting their posts?

We automatically ban account that shitpost for upvotes. Plagiarism-checking we leave to HiveWatchers.
New users on the hive usually only care about making money (I know since I was one of them when I joined.) People work on incentives, if you support them by throwing a few upvotes their way, they usually stick around to show off their talents.
Hive account@ocd is doing a great job at curation. It's just that the very tiny gems never get noticed. This problem will only worsen as more users join the platform.

They'd be much better served to get a Twitter account...

We've tried that for years Traci, people come, post, and leave because no one notices them [1]. We need a new approach before Steem gets ahead of us.

Best of all - we don't require the keys to your account.

We don't either. We use Hivesigner AND revoke access to ourselves once the user has 500HP.

If you're upvoting content sight unseen, simply based on belonging to a vote trading service, what exactly would you call that, if not "vote harvesting"?

It is not vote harvesting because, as I said earlier, you only get an upvote if your content is worthwhile. Earlier services existed purely to upvote in circlejerk fashion, we are not one of them.

[1]: The ones that do stay are usually people with solid HP and virtually guaranteed side-income. Also, people leave if the content is boring. More posters would almost certainly solve this problem.

Finally, I invite you to join Groupvote's discord server so you can join an existing conversation on the matter.

Thanks
The Groupvote Team

PS: If you are satisfied with my answer, I request you to upvote this content because my reputation has taken a toll from your earlier downvote.