While the title might be an overstatement, the situation has been getting worse and worse. Self-upvoted bs has started to plague the hot section, the trending section, and the promoted section(obviously). And the new section, well, we all know that has been completely useless for pretty much the whole time I've been on steemit.
Why do we as steemians work so actively towards destroying what might be a great opportunity to build income streams for those who can actually produce quality posts?
The situation with self vote bots has become the same as with games. When I was young (haha), we used to play games for the fun of it. But nowadays games have become something where you pay to win. That really makes most online games today worth playing only for the first few months after release, unless you're paying to win. The same thing has happened on steemit. Unless you take advantage of the paid up votes, you won't be noticed. Now don't get butt hurt when I say this, but if you take advantage of the paid up votes, you're putting yourself above those who hold better intentions than yourself. And if that is the case, how long do you think that can last?
Paying for up votes isn't a sustainable thing. Increasing the payout of everyone would be. Currently, those who expect to be rewarded for quality realize that it is better to go else where if you want to get paid. That is the harsh reality. Therefore, more and more useless shit is plaguing steemit and something really needs to be done. The only thing that will safe steemit with the current way things are developing, is if we get hundreds of content creators who can make it anywhere, without paying for votes. If that were to happen, paying for votes wouldn't matter, because the pool would be sucked towards those content creators. However, the downside would still be that it would get even harder to be noticed here.
Steemit still has a long way to go.