Steemit was founded on the principle that Manual curation by its users would make the Steemit ecosystem go round. Those that wrote or shared valuable content with the rest of users on Steemit would be rewarded for their time by other users voting for their article, which in turn leads to higher returns as well as pushing the posts to the hot and trending pages.
However, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. More and more, I’m seeing that users are selling their votes to bots (something I’m partly guilty of) although only 10% of my votes.
This leads to a huge problem. Most posts we see on the hot and tending tab are only there not because of their content, but because the votes were bought. I can send a 50SBD vote to a vote selling service and can be guaranteed to hit the trending tab. You may be thinking that this is great when you have something important to share, but it hurts the Steemit ecosystem.
Instead of users manually curating, we’re creating an automated system where anyone who pays gets an unfair advantage. We start forgetting about great content where authors spent their time to beautifully craft something for other Steemians.
Manual curation needs to be rewarded far greater in order to incentivize users of Steemit to find amazing content rather than the spam and trash that gets to the trending articles. A user can spend 500 SBD in a week and be sure to always reach the trending pages - which in my opinion is a flawed system.
What are your thoughts on automatic vs manual curation? Should something be done to change the future of Steemit? I’d love to hear your opinions.