In short, bid bots and vote-selling markets are another reason for people outside the platform to invest, buy steem with fiat because they offer an opportunity for passive income in exchange for "currency risk".
So in short, the primary argument FOR is that they generate passive income for some purported bid bot 'investor'? How exactly is that supposed to scale?
No, wait, I could "bait" people in other ways...
You'd prefer to 'bait' people using artificially distorted rewards rather than a catchy title, and that occasionally mentioning it down in the comments, somehow that absolves you of creating the fiction to the casual observer, that you somehow earned the $200?
Just like capitalism. You know, the real world.
Someone offers "work" (or "labor") - this is the content creator. Someone else offers "capital" - this is the passive investor.
Labor + capital = prosperity
Except that the steem economy needs diversification. Just "content and attention" (the "blogging business") is not enough.
We now have games too (Steem Monsters - @steemmonsters, Drug Wars @drugwars, Next Colony @nextcolony, etc), but more diversification is needed.
We used to have "open source software" with Utopian but alas, that business folded.
We have Fundition @fundtion for charity management but I'm not sure it's thriving.
I talked for instance about a marketplace for selling art here: Revisiting Steemland: a fairer and more transparent art market as a new "export".
Another idea is a marketplace for selling unused storage space. A bit like filecoin / storj / sia / bittorrent but with the power of the best cryptoeconomic system, that of steem: Steembit: a decentralized storage marketplace for Steemland
There are a bunch of other ideas for diversification, like @oracle-d for instance.
The more diverse the types of work one can source from Steemland (supposedly better quality or cheaper price than elsewhere), the more attractive the ecosystem is for investors.
This isn't an answer, and neither is the subsequent vacuous mess of platitudes you dumped after it.
I did not intend to "dump a vacuous mess of platitudes". My intention was to talk economy. "Labour + capital = prosperity" is a literary shorthand for a basic macro-economic law (added value).
If I had written instead "mass * velocity = momentum" you probably would not have taken that to be a "vacuous mess of platitudes".
So perhaps the discipline of economics is for you a "vacuous mess of platitudes". Could that be the case ? Perhaps you just don't know enough about economics and it all looks Chinese (or Greek) to you ?
I specifically asked how you expect the bidbot investment thesis would scale. You continue to patronize me with your responses.
What is exactly your concern about "scaling", what do you feel is not scalable, can you elaborate ?
"Scale" in what sense ? Technical ? Or economical ?
If the former, I would need you to clarify your concern because I don't see what is the scalability issue you are concerned about.
If the latter, I think the "bidbot investment" does not NEED to scale - this is what I was referring to when talking about diversification. The "bidbot investment" will stabilize to an equilibrium level that will be reached through market mechanics.
As an illustration, the early bidbots (booster for instance) were distributing 80 - 85% of the bids. Some people saw the opportunity and started offering bidbots that pledged to return 100% of the value of the bids (the rising).
Then even more aggressive offers appeared, such as spydo and tipu which also return (under different form) a part of the curation rewards.
For as long as there is demand for bidbot services, and that demand outstrips supply, there will be people ready to offer those services. If running a bidbot becomes more expensive than the earnings, the operators will need to reduce the payout to investors. If on the other hand the people buying bidbot services would feel that they don't provide enough value for the risk, they will reduce the sums used for bidding (potentially down to zero)
It's a free market (for attention) at work, and it works pretty well.
However, it is fragile - it depends on the aggregate number of eyeballs which the content can reach. This is why steem needs a wider array of services on offer, thus allowing investors to redirect their "steem power" capital to the most profitable opportunity.
I see your point. However their profitability and supply can also be heavily influenced by downvoting. If I only look at a post in terms of proportion of rewards, the case for downvoting is easy.
The community is under no obligation to acknowledge the back-end transaction that facilitated the disproportion. The tenor of the argument I have seen so far, is that for some reason the onlooker should be obligated to consider that transaction when evaluating whether a post has been over-rewarded. The implication is that these bots are 'here to stay' and are a persistent 'feature of STEEM'. I don't subscribe to that at all.
I hope better places emerge to sink STEEM, and I hope the concept of bid bots will wither away and die. Either way I don't intend to facilitate their existence by participating, short of returning excessive rewards back to the pool. There are more than enough targets for my eyeballs that don't use them worthy of those rewards.
One important question to ask is: who, and on what basis decides whether a post is "over- rewarded" ?
Take a look at steemworld.org. You see that for this post, the "author payout" is ~131.82USD
Now if you look at the Steemium comment under this post, it says:
"126.23$ has been spent to promote this content using Steemium."
That makes a net payout to the author (me) of about 5 USD
Do you consider that to be "over rewarded" ?
On what basis, how do you reckon my post (implicitly, the time spent to research and write it) should be valued ?
Hmm ... you don't give me much gripping surface there ... I don't see how to engage further.
Sorry, as I forgot to leave a comment with my downvote.
The comment would have gone like this:
I agree with @joshman as well as with @smooth that in comparison to the content this post is taking a out of proportion share of the rewardpool.
Wonder what's your argument to downvote my latest post, taking away 95% of my rewards ;).
In my opinion capitalist practise is a bit out of place on a self-governed, de-centralized (as much as possible) platform, but hey, everybody is free to do as they like.
And: No thanks for revenge-downvoting.
Why am I not shocked? ...and now the true colors are shown. I guess a few cents was too much reward for you. I healed it in any case.
Thanks @joshman. One meets some nice people while trying to contribute a bit to this platform!
No, that was not it. I explain it above. I disagree with "reward-size" downvoting, I have written at length about it. Please read my reply to @captainklaus above
See also: Spammers gonna spam and especially Steem Social Lab: we need a charter