The results of your work will most probably be greatly helpful on the long run and I need to thank you for all your efforts to help our platform being more sustainable, filled with integrity, quality and a sound community. From here on, you will always get my 100% upvotes, as long as I come across your work and it keeps this level of quality, of course. ;)

The information shared and the questions asked deserve a solid look. though @sweetsssj is performing extremely well on her own articles, from the very beginning, the ventures she has delved into upvoting such posts isn't my cup of tea. Same with bots so far, and many high ranking Steemians are using them, sometimes to our detriment as well as the bots upvote pure garbage! I have never yet used this kind of language on this platform, it is a first in the history of my account here, but I have witnessed posts that surely were far from deserving any special attention empowering the "creator" of the posts. Because of this, I can't help but believe we should manually and thoroughly read the articles we upvote and give them the credit they really deserve. The quality of our entire platform depends on our quality time curating, posting and interacting with one another in positive creative manners. Are we to settle for less? Maybe some can, but I don't want to as the resulting effect on the entire platform is actually detrimental to its integrity.

I have tested the community with a shorter less quality post once to see what would be the response, way back in the day when articles could hit the $1000 SBD mark. Happily, the community had not voted as much for that one as they had done my previous high quality posts. It made me happy, though I lost some reputation for it, it was worth the test, at least for me. Has the community changed to a point where quality isn't that much importance anymore? Maybe to some eyes, maybe from one perspective to another levels of quality defers... Fair enough, but what kind of quality content are we looking for? It is only a question each and everyone of us can answer individually.

Personally, I could not upvote such posts unless they were in deed artistically endowed, had quality work behind it that uprises the quality of our platform with its content. In all the posts I just came across on @agab, I couldn't see myself upvote any of them. I wonder and doubt @ned would endorse the content himself. He must have became aware of this by now and taken the proper measures necessary to take care of this situation. Maybe he simply gambled, as many of us do or did? Is his trust broken? By now, he'd be the one to ask all the questions you asked us and would LOVE to read his answer as well as the nature of the "contract" between them, as both side of the equation MUST be heard by the community, if we are to resolve this matter.

At large, the impact of bidding on bots as well as deferring our reputable Steem Power to others, is a gamble. Is it worthwhile? I mostly don't think it is, unless rare and highly supervised circumstances. such circumstances don't include the use of bots, still, in my mind. Not only is it the reputation of the individuals partaking in wavering quality of reputable actions for our platform but, more importantly, this affect the entire community and platform itself negatively diminishing its content or spirit.

Thanks a lot for all your dedicated work and this powerful initiative. I try to cultivate mindfulness in relation to anything I share here, whether it is a post, a comment or simply and upvote or resteem to our communities. We deserve it, we need it and grow with its content as well as its spirit.

Namaste :)

P.S.: My BTS address is the same as the one I use here: eric-boucher