Ok, just a quick idea that may or may not be possible and for an added bonus, may or may not be useful. With that personal vote of confidence in the idea, let's go.
What I was wondering is if there is a way for a tag to be commented on a post that would call in a bot to vote on the post. Before you say 'yes, that already happens', can the bot subscribe to only some users comments to upvote the post?
What I was thinking is along the lines of this:
There are plenty of curation bots out there and it may be much better for the platform if they voted on decent content only. They could 'hire' manual curators who they trust to tag useful content. This way the curator can still vote on the content they like without attracting a bot vote.
The 'hire' a curator would mean that a curator could get a small percentage of the curation payout or something similar. Perhaps it would be paid in SP so that their own curation power increases too.
Big accounts holding a large amount of SP or their bots could more accurately target decent content and may set guidelines for their 'curation employees' to follow meaning that the curators are accountable and fireable if they misuse their 'upvote markers'. The big accounts are likely the more caring about the future of Steemit and therefore should be more interested in what content they upvote and what percentage of the pool they use. Leaving their votes unused rather than upvoting quality is counter to their long-term goals.
Potentially, a trusted curator could even call in the size of vote depending on content value. For example, Mark1, Mark5, Mark10 meaning that they can vary the bot vote on the fly too. The bot owner could give guidelines for qualification of value also.
If the bot is set to say vote down to 80% power, curators can be warned or the bot goes to sleep and when it wakes up, starts voting the back log. I am sure that when it is getting close to the 80, a warning can be sent to the curators somehow or they can see what others are marking through a UI. Double votes on content can also be viewed or, first one gets voted..
It could also be used effectively by accounts like
and
who could find and pay trusted researchers to do the leg work on the fly and mark posts for flagging. This would take away most of the need for a dropbox and will give a revenue stream to those interested in 'doing the weeding'.
This would also remove a lot of the accidental big votes on spam, plagiarised or shitpost content and may even see some more variation of providers reach trending. More variation should be happening there but it is not because many of the big accounts are only voting either who they know or, who their bots have been set to vote upon. This squeezes nearly everyone one else out of ever having a chance of getting into trending, a massive demotivator for many.
I know there are some very good initiatives out there like 
There are accounts like 
In my view, the people that have faith in Steemit and think it has the chance to grow are likely under the impression that content is going to matter in the long-term. The highly invested (lots of SP, time, effort) would be somewhat crazy to not use their voting power as much as possible on a wider pool of decent authors as it would support the drive for quality by actually finding quality people and supporting them. There is a huge difference between a dollar, ten, twenty or (yet to happen for me) hundred dollar payout for authors, and increasing their chances of larger payouts if they have good content raises the incentive to consistently perform.
As said, this may or may not be possible and it likely has some cons in there also but, as someone that does want Steemit to survive, this may be an added tool that helps bury the nonsense by significantly increasing the incentive for quality as well as giving a more sensitive approach to users and increased revenue stream possibilities for those worthy.
Yes/No/Maybe/gtfo?
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]