The winds of change have an unpleasant odor. There is a bad storm coming.
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<img src="https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/12/26/19/30/sky-3041241_960_720.jpg" />
<center><sup>source: Pixabay</sup></center>
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Because of real life schedules,  I was away for a few months after joining Steemit, and recently returned.  Getting a fresh look at my feed, my first impression was that I was in the wrong place because it seemed everything was being run by bots!

Not just a few bots. Lots of bots! All wanting to boost my ratings.
  
Posts that are pure nonsensical garbage were getting rewards in the hundreds of dollars and had several hundred upvotes.  First introduction postings with minimum content were being touted as  great contributions to the STEEMIT community through heavy rewards and upvotes.

It is clear that the secret of gaming the system is out and the robbers are raping the rewards pool by paying bot creators to siphon rewards away from talented, creative Steemians who spend their time actually adding value to the platform. The high-traffic postings were giving detailed instructions on how to use bots to buy your way to fame and fortune.  Other posts were listings of sources of "support" dumped onto selected Steemians to elevate their "I-had-a-nice-day" posts.

Now, I don't have a problem with gambling, but when the winnings come from the pockets of bystanders, it seems a bit wrong for that to be considered acceptable behavior.  Paying a bot to put you to the top of a popularity list would be fine if the payment came from your own pocket and if that payment money were pooled to be the reward pool for the "bot Betters". In this case, the payment for bot service goes to the bot creator and the reward comes from the pockets of the real creators of value in Steemit. It's like going into a casino to watch gamblers at the tables and have their winnings disappear from your pockets! 

Of course others have noticed and have voiced varying degrees of irritation. Often, it's best to moderate your expressions of discontent when the little flag over to the right can be clicked and wave you out of existence. It's there for a purpose.

To complicate the problem, there is nothing illegal about having the bots, and the clever creators have a right to be paid for their creativity.

While that is going on, creative Steemians are making masterpieces to be posted so they can exist for a brief week or two before they disappear into the depths of darkness, beyond the reach of upvotes and associated rewards. That part of the Steemit structure forces you to be at your keyboard, riding the surfboard of incoming posts and compete for the first day's upvotes. In a few days in that environment, your brilliant short story, your poem, drawing, or music will become useless. Besides, who has time available to enjoy your masterpiece when the time is more profitably spent curating recent posts?

Just think: an increasingly valuable library of quality contributions designed to become obsolete!

Something is basically wrong with this picture: Steemit is designed to divert attention from the old to the new. What could be the world’s best repository of contemporary literature, art, and music was designed to prevent that very outcome, and was instead designed to focus on the very new.

It appears that Steemit has the built-in tools to allow it to eat itself; hardly a successful survival instinct.

What is to be done? That answer lies with the big guys; the whales and the large dolphins. It is for them to realize that the feeding frenzy created by the bots is self-destructive and, left unchecked, will drive talent away from Steemit to other platforms such as ONO. Little will remain but sharks feeding on sharks.

Now, *there* is an interesting 202 pages of White Paper worth slowly browsing through.