At the 3rd time of asking, today I finally received a response to this question from the 'founder and developer of Smartsteem.com - biggest vote-selling market with over 3500 sellers and 2nd biggest bid-bot with over 2.4 Million Steempower'....
And here it is:
You can read the full conversation here if you wish. It does get a little 'bitchy' though, so to speak.
I had planned to add my own views on @heimindanger's 'Operation Clean Trending' post the other day, and today's discussion with @therealwolf (as above), has brought this forward as this post would have overlapped with my reply on the thread linked above.
'Shine a bad light'
@therealwolf - If you feel that a reply would 'shine a bad light' on your service, then this speaks volumes in itself. You have answered my question honestly, whilst shooting yourself and your service in the foot.
If any other witness who develops/runs/delegates to a bid-bot service would like to try to shine a good light whilst answering the title of this blog, please do.
Whitelists/Blacklists have been mostly ineffective at stopping low quality posts from reaching Trending/Hot - they are just an excuse to write another post about how they are not doing an effective job at all.
When @steemitblog can't reach trending because a new Cryptokitty has been born, or an aging guitarist likes his leather jackets being on show a little too much, you know something isn't right.
When the owner of the the hottest decentralised application to hit the Steem Blockchain so far is making negative noises towards Bid-bots, you know there are issues ahead.
If @heimindanger chooses to take @dtube to another Blockchain because the content @dtube promote is nowhere to be seen in the 'Hot' and 'Trending' pages, it will be a monumental blow to STEEM.
@dtube are one of the Steem's flagship applications, we need the likes of these applications here, and we don't need your 'Smart' service at all.
Today I am removing all witness votes to accounts I can link to bid-bots.
I know at least one Witness who's given much to the minnows over the past year and so this decision was not easy, I hope they will understand.
Have a good weekend
Asher @abh12345
If you wish to vote for a witness who has no connections to bid-bots and can actually see further than their nearest bank, @steemcommunity is one of these, and you can do this here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Hi Ash - I'm totally with you on this...
You did share a list already - but I have misplaced it - please would you remind me of the witnesses linked with bid-bots.
Thank you
Great!
This was the list, it may not be 100% and is 11 days old now: https://steemit.com/busy/@abh12345/how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people
Thank you :)
Thank you, just what I was looking for. Done and done. Wishing you and Paula success as witness
Thank you!
My dear friend, I'm so new here. I try to do my best to understand. I'm getting through the basics of everything such as SP delegation, curation and such. The other day I figured out that there were Witnesses we were supposed to vote for. I was talking to a friend about it here, trying to get some information. I asked a question, so is this where it gets political? He responded with yes. I ask you to please go and look through everything I've done if you wish. I genuinely want to help people. And it sounds like you do too. I had decided when I discovered witnesses, that I would probably wait a year or so before I started voting. And during that time I would do my best to research and figure out who I should vote for. But you have inspired me to double down on my researching so that I can vote. I would like to thank you so much for your enlightenment and taking time to put this out there. I also love you for speaking your heart and your mind and also for following your heart. If you do not believe in something, you should not support it. Regardless of the repercussions. Anyway, I have a busy day today and I have to go out and meet some new people, so I bid you adieu. I hope you have a great day. All of my love to you and all of yours. And may our creator bless yous.
Thank you, and thank you for taking the time to research into your witness choices. This is a long and arduos task, but I think it's one that everyone should parttake in.
This list may help start the process: https://steemit.com/busy/@abh12345/how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people
And this is full witness list: https://steemian.info/witnesses
Have a great day!
To be honest, the response really shot him on the foot. If the service was good and beneficial, no response at all should shine a bad light to smartsteem. People should generally say something good about it. Ita just like asking for peoples opinion about dlive, or dtube ...no one would have anything negative to say because these services serve for the better good. To say the least, he should be happy to get feedbacks coz they will help him modify his service for the greater good of this community.
Indeed :)
hay@asher i'am in steemit is a beginner. I do not know much about steemit. but, I always try to create interesting content and try to improve my reputation with SP.
I really like to read every post you share because it can be a new insight for me.
@abh12345 and @paulag
Good for you, I think this is a popular goal :)
Go Asher Go!
You know by now that I fully do support tour witness project! Not only because I do believe in the project but also because I do find it utmost that witnesses who really care about Steem and whom do see the money part as merely a side effect, should be heard. And have a vote when the witnesses are discussing the future of Steem!!
Thank you for your support @fullcoverbetting, I hope we can at least voice changes that will be for the better.
Cheers!
If every one would delegate to a bid bot we would have a computer have where your goal is to earn as much money as possible. While doing so you can use every possible trick and don't have to think about ethics.
How far are we from that situation? Looks like the number of bots is still growing. Perhaps even to such a high number that the request can't keep up with. I don't think you want to know how some people play this money game? Neither do I prefer to tell you what I someone's do. But I'm not afraid of sharing any info, so I might wrote another series of posts about this subject.
I thought Steemit was meant to be a social platform. If you like you can use it for such, but you won't really earn big time. Unless you are a user of the first hour.
What possibilities are there to wipe all paid upvote bots out of Steemit?
Sounds like a lovely place to be, not!
The bot numbers grow by the week, it's insane.
Without changes at code level, 0.
And those changes at code level can those be done by witnesses? Or the Steemit owner?
The Blockchain developers - steem inc.
Application devs like busy.org and Steemit can chose how they want the front end to look - hiding bidbot voted posts for example.
I honestly never understood the influence of witnesses. But it could be their influence is very limited?
I've heard that in the post one could only post 4 blogs per day. But that's neither something that can be created by the witnesses, correct?
Witnesses choose the code to run. If everything is perfectly amenable to everyone they all run the same code.
I believe they are not all running the identical code. They independently set certain variables, for instance the proportion of SBD, Steem, and SP you are rewarded with for posts and curation.
Code is infinitely mutable, and witnesses that retain support can run any code they want. If they go 'off the reservation' they are unlikely to retain support.
Mostly they are dependent on stake-weighted votes, just like your posts, so the 37 whales that own the majority of Steem choose who they want based upon the code they are desirous of, and they choose that based on the ROI they can expect from it.
That's why choosing witnesses is important.
Thanks for your answer!
I would say that's why it's important for all 37 whales to vote for witnesses. What the remaining Steemonians do is then totally irrelevant.
Thanks, Asher for putting spotlight on the "business" side of Steemit. Paying for attention is attention not deserved. And my friends are now powerless due to the fact they delegated away their power. Or powered down and moved on.
Yes this is happening all around sadly, but who can blame people for wanting to make more money. Sadly, I think this is detrimental to the platform longer term, and I obviously won't be doing the same.
Thanks for your support :)
It's clear to me at least it won't be sustainable.
Edit: removed previous text
I don't believe in negativity - I believe in change:
https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/open-discussion-fix-trending-and-stop-promotion-abuse
That's a smart reply, but why so much negativity?! Make love not war! 🖖
This looks like as gooda place as any to leave wolf's original comment.
https://phist.steemdata.com/history?identifier=https%3A%2F%2Fsteemit.com%2Fsteemit%2F%40abh12345%2Fwhat-would-steemit-look-like-if-everyone-chose-to-delegate-their-stake-to-a-bid-bot%23%40therealwolf%2Fre-abh12345-what-would-steemit-look-like-if-everyone-chose-to-delegate-their-stake-to-a-bid-bot-20180407t112427035z
You bring up a very valid point @abh12345.
I am optimistic the Hivemind/Communities feature will lessen the impact of the bid bots since the trending page will be less of an issue. Personally, the easiest way for the developers to handle this is to do away with the trending page altogether. Since it basically is a list of "paid" advertisements, get rid of it.
I agree with you if D.Tube moves to another blockchain, it would be a huge blow to STEEM. This is something people need to be aware of. Those who are raking in the big bucks by moving their stuff to the trending page might have little if the price of STEEM gets back to 6 cents.
Hopefully this becomes more of a discussion as time goes forward.
The bidded posts can be hidden, and likely will be in future - if the developers can keep up with new bots springing up - This list is tough to manage in itself, let alone a Black or White list.
Does this help the reward pool though? Perhaps. There will be a load of promoted posts gaining little visibility, seen only by the people bidding for Trending. The hope is that if you wish to be seen in a community, you have to go bot free - and therefore, will the demand for bots drop?
I freaking hope so. This is actually worth exploring more as a topic/post. If you head in this direction let me know.
And yes, as for D-apps or others leaving the chain due to lack of visibility over rubbish, this would be a huge failure. It is why I was so pleased to see @heimindanger's post yesterday. Ned was not against bots at all at the event last november, if he was pressured by the likes of the above, elear, etc, I wonder if this would change.
Thanks for your comments, you've given me new things to think about.
If you'd completely remove vote-services, the trending would be full of people like @haejin, @adsactly & co. who are producing multiple posts per day.
You know – it's funny. You are absolutely correct.
In the absence of active vote services, we would simply have crap of a different flavor popping up in Trending. It would be equally worthless to the majority of users and equally pernicious.
And before I go any further, I want to be really clear – I'm not one of the people/analysts/punditry on Steemit who is aggressively against bid bots. I believe that if a system exists that allows you an easy exploit, you would be a fool not to take advantage of it. In the case of bid bots, it's not even in exploit, it's an implicit functional operation which the mechanics of reward distribution on the blockchain not only allow for but explicitly promote.
Some people here are going to disagree with me. They're wrong. When a mechanical architecture privileges inhuman methods of engaging with the system, it's no surprise when those methods reach primacy.
But I think as cogent, capable analysts, people who can look at an environment and determine whether the results are what we would like to see as participants, we both have to agree that vote services are doing a disservice to users who want to actually find good content.
Yes, they provide a different flavor of bad – but it's still bad.
In your defense, I'll point out that the recommendations are bad because of an invalid assumption about how the system works, and the value of consensus versus individual worth. That's not your fault.
But it kind of is your fault that a system that you have implemented and support is making the situation worse. I don't hold a grudge about that, but I do see it as true.
From the perspective who isn't making a fat load of cash off of running a bot service and trying to make the best of the crappy situation that we all find ourselves in, you can certainly understand why your success at making our lives worse might be a sore spot for some people.
From my perspective, it would be fascinating if your system decided to take on an air of radical transparency and start publishing weekly numbers about how effective the vote bot platform really is. Not as advertising but rather as a means of depicting how much effect moving that much SP around on the blockchain has in manipulating the results at the top.
I'm not going to tell you to stop; that would be foolish. And stupid on my part. But I would ask that if you're going to manipulate the experience that we have, you might at least return to us some measure of value in terms of information. Yes, all of that data is probably available on the blockchain for the effort of mining it out, formatting it up, and crunching it. I am probably more than capable of making those reports happen alone.
As a gesture of good faith, it would be great to see you and others in your position take care of that for us.
Maybe, with more information at hand, we might be able to come up with a solution which is more agreeable (if not completely agreeable) to everyone involved.
Fair points.
The last section RE information would be a nice to have, but I suspect it will not be forth-coming. Which means at some point one of us will have to go delving into the accounts of these bots/owners.
Dirty work and not for the faint hearted.
I strongly support almost every point you make, save that it is necessary to have bidbots on a social media platform.
There may be communities where that is beneficial. For most communities, potentiating paid upvotes seems like a definite drawback to the society, who are likely focused on a different metric of value.
If hivemind doesn't enable this kind of exclusion, SMTs will. We'll have to see what shakes out.
Otherwise spot on!
Let's be clear – I didn't say that they were necessary.
I said that they were inevitable.
Given the mechanics of votes as architected on the steem blockchain, voting bots which take money and operate as bidding pools are inevitable. They were inevitable from day one and they remain inevitable. They have every advantage over a human curator at a deep, mechanical level.
Are they necessary? In this environment, it appears so. In a well-designed environment? Much less so. But you go to war with the environment you have, not the environment that you want.
Hive mind does not modify any of the underlying motivations that give rise to vote bots. Nor do SMTs. If anything, both of them, which will require hardfork 20, will simply give rise to more bid bots and vote bots spread out across a wider attack surface.
And it is because we have a singular metric of value, only one judgment which is assumed to apply to everyone. The most, most powerful votes win.
Individual accounts can't decide what they want to see more of. They get no decision-making there. Their votes go into the great consensus, and if they don't agree with a great consensus – they are effectively meaningless.
Hardfork 20 is going to make this worse by tightening the time limit on curational votes and a number of other issues. Manual interaction on the blockchain is going to be even further deemphasized, and there is only one inevitable result.
Systems are as they are. We must observe them accurately and assess their impacts if we want to make good judgments about what to interact with and what to do with our time.
So it seems social platform projects on the Steem blockchain will inevitably fail, unless they create and extract value in some way other than the distribution of the reward pool. Does that make the collapse of Steem, the blockchain, inevitable, too? Maybe what remains to play out is how SMT projects will generate value for Steem, whether through hucksterism or real value for their users.
Actually, you probably could have stopped with "it seems that social platform projects will inevitably fail."
Statistically, we can observe that to be true.
But as regards social platform projects that leverage the steem blockchain is a backend database – yes, they really need to extract value in some way other than the distribution of the reward pool because the distribution of the reward pool is purely done by proof of stake, which means that it is purely divided up by the actions of those who have the most stake already with out concern for anyone who has lesser stake. And why should they?
Even more elementally than that, the reward pool is entirely constructed of inflationary value. Everything in the reward pool at every moment of distribution is truly money being printed from nothing, if you accept that steem is a cryptocurrency. It is declared mechanically as the inflationary increase in the number of tokens per unit of time, and it is literally the rate at which tokens that you already hold become less valuable.
Which is a long, roundabout way of saying that distributing that inflationary currency by way of waiting the votes of those who already have proven stake has an inevitable outcome. The only way that new stakeholders can find value in relation to currencies which people will actually let you spend on their goods is for the demand to increase faster than the inflationary rate/reward pool.
In order to do that, services need to offer something to an individual user of more value than the steem crypto-commodity itself. Something which inevitably offsets the lack of privacy afforded to a public blockchain as well, let us not forget.
"You might get paid a little bit" is not going to be sufficient to maintain a social network. It might barely be sufficient to maintain a platform, but it is entirely the wrong approach to building a social network. The shock is not to that steem as a social network exists because of it, the shock is that steem is a social network exists despite that being the major pitch for the entire system for the last two years.
Is the collapse of the steem blockchain inevitable?
Was the collapse of MySpace inevitable? In a sense, yes. The same dynamics in many ways are at play. Except that steem as a social networking platform was never popular, certainly not to the level that MySpace was.
Maybe, if we get very lucky, after the current wave of state interest in ridiculously overreaching regulation of crypto-commodities dies down a little, the market as a whole will recover and a rising tide lifts all boats. But it's only functional so far as that tide lifts faster than the combination of social media disinterest and actual fiat trade value counter one another. When one of those two stops being an exceedingly useful pillar, the whole architecture collapses.
I would make the argument that all blockchains generate value through hucksterism. And they do so less transparently than fiat currencies generate value through hucksterism. It's certainly possible that SMT projects will generate value through attracting interest in the steem blockchain, and some of that will be purely marketing and emotional manipulation. It's also possible that one of the SMT projects will actually be put forward by people who understand gamification, social network design, social media, and UI engineering.
Possible.
I wouldn't hold my breath, but I would keep my eye open. Just one.
It's so freaking complex and as a minnow it just messes with our head. I'm not capable of trying to fix any of the problems myself and I am not in a position to take a lead, and even if I was I would have no idea how. I chose to not take part in the bid bod story anymore, I don't use them, they bring too much negativity to what I believe in steem should be about. It won't bring me the biggest profit, but I don't mind. On this blockchain it is the same as in society: lots of money makes more money. But does that bring happyness? I don't have lot's of money, I don't expect to make a lot here either. Doing my dayjob pays better. I'm not holier than the pope, but that is what keeps me happy and satisfied.
So happy to see you and paula stand up for the same ideas I stand for. I hope it doesn't backfire. You guys have my support!
Thank you Jef :)
Backfire in terms of large votes, it will - these accounts are mainly related to Bid-bots.
This is fine for me, I have no issue with however we place as Witnesses, as long as we stand up for what we think is right.
Thank you!
I made a remark in one of your posts before that voteselling and delegations is a way that some people earn from this platform and that it is basically printing money.
Your answer to me then was it is short-term and printing money till its worthless and made me think on that note because that was the week we both tested if curation earned enough or if delegations were better and we arrived at the same conclusion that we are running the long game and engaging the community rather than just making a quick buck.
I've also realized that not everyone has the time to curate or create content but we also need investors and not just mere holders but they see the value that they can get in putting money.
I have my family bought Steem and SBD to power up accounts although they can't use it to manually curate or create content they are doing their part of investing and reinvesting the gains they get. I curate for them though.
The hivemind and communities is one feature that I am really excited to see. Also we can really have a feature that curating is better compensated as well.
I like building and engaging communities but if that can pay well also then that would be super. I know if we do it elsewhere we dont really get anything back but as long as it is better to votesell and delegate people will always use the easier option.
We are the ones down in the trenches doing our bit to engage and make the community better so we are keeping a balance for now.
Now have we reached tipping point? even with the use of bid bots I still see and read a lot of interesting posts so its not yet at that point that it is all garbage but we have to make some adjustments to the system.
Yeah, we do need investors - but there are good ways to invest (for the future), and not so good ones I think.
I hope so, this could also 'hide' promoted content. This will be more pleasing to the eye, but may not make much difference to the slammed rewards pool.
Most of the engagement on low quality Trending posts, is about use of bots on that Trending post - clearly this is not what the the aim/focus of the post was! :)
I'm not sure if we are at the tipping point yet, I'll just continue this stance and see what happens.
Cheers for that (should boost you nicely for tomorrow) :D
Bots ruin Steemit and mean the same authors are at the top. It gives no chance for the minnows to rise and perpetuates the inequality of the platform.
I would say bots actually do provide minnows the chance to be at the top - if you don't have the stake (vested SP), then you have to pay if you want to be the most visible.
This reinforces the point. The best content doesn’t get to the top. It’s those with the most money/ most willing to pay for it that rise to the top.
How about you grow a backbone instead of switching back and forth with your opinion about bid-bots.
How does the above change my opinion?
If you want to be more visible, use a bid-bot
If you want to contribute to the draining of the rewards pool out to bid-bots owners/developers/delegators, use a bid-bot
Both statements exist together and are not contradictory.
I somehow missed this yesterday.
I am really glad that finally the problem is actually gaining traction and the issues are being faced. I have been very disappointed in the lack of witnesses, whales and large delegators willingness to engage and discuss the topic. I think the 'bad light' comment speaks volumes to their knowledge of the harm they are causing to the community for massive gains for a narrow band.
Perhaps there is a space in the environment for some kind of paid promotion bots or something but, in their current form they are toxic. If everyone delegated content becomes completely irrelevant and this becomes an auction site. Without 'quality of content' to temper the voting sensitivity, it very quickly escalates to highest bidder takes all and a monopolised system by one bot with only a handful of potential customers. It is like all the people who could afford to buy the Mona Lisa except, there is no painting, just a blank canvas.
not that it would ever get that far though, Steem prices would collapse well before that to zero because it becomes a pay to play pyramid scheme.
No problem, we are busy making our own way each day :)
I'm a little sad, but not surprised, to have not yet had a comment from a bot owner/dev/delegator who can shine some positive light - I wonder why? :)
If you wish to make your way over to therealwolfs 50 word, $200 post and produce a similar comment there, it could be worth awaiting a response. Or not!
Thanks for your support on this, i'll continue making the noise while others are there to do the same.
https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/open-discussion-fix-trending-and-stop-promotion-abuse#@tarazkp/re-therealwolf-open-discussion-fix-trending-and-stop-promotion-abuse-20180408t083959208z
For me the discussion isn't so much whether or not vote bots of any stripe should exist, or be used, or even how much might be appropriate, or for whom.
Because the answer to all of those questions end up taking us around in circles and away from the real issue:
What kind of content should people being seeing, and how is it possible for more people to see it?
Well, content, I'm afraid, is highly subjective. I'm bound to find something interesting or entertaining that someone else won't. It's tough to find universal appeal. So, what everyone is calling trash and garbage could actually have worth to someone.
So, what are we really talking about? What are we really trying to say? What do we really want to resolve here?
I don't think our goal is to take down the vote bots. That's something that happens once the central issue is solved. So, how do we get to that, and what's the solution for it?
The content I wish to see in Trending or at the top of each tag is the content that has been placed there by the votes of the community as a whole, or the interested parties related to the tag in question.
I gave 2/3 examples in the post, one being @steemitblog's recent Hivemind update Post, which barely made it into the top 10 despite 100s of manual votes.
My current thinking/hope is that communities will lockout/hide bot voted posts, and the leaders/owners/larger stakeholders who want their community to shine will push the best content to the top.
One reqiurement would be a centralised bot-list updated often, that's doable.
This could then reduce the popularity and profitability of the bots to the delegators. Although, the quieter the round, the more profit available for a given bid and so bids purely for profit may keep the boys running, as the bidders, owners, and delegators care little about visibly as they are all making a profit.
Yeah. I wonder how much refusing the payout discourages people upvoting it. I know plenty of people still do it, and some of their posts have received much higher, too. Everyone should really be following steemitblog anyway, so the trending page becomes moot, especially when they've denied payout.
I'm hoping that what you say about the hivemind/communities deal happens exactly how you describe it, but in that hivemind update you mentioned, they had the ability to create community bots listed. Do you know what that's supposed to mean? There's also supposed to be the capability of creating bot trackers, so it kind of sounds like they're heading towards bot institutionalization rather than away from it.
Maybe it's a community bot that goes around hiding posts that use other bots? 😁
I'm not sure to be honest, but one would hope they are to aid and not the opposite.
That would be awesome in my opinion. My concern, and I'm sure I don't have a clue at all about this, is that it will essentially put pressure on every community to offer some kind of bot that will provide some level of support for their members. Or, it could be the means by which the moderators or owners of the community accounts get some measure of compensation. Or both? I don't know. It just seems like a step in the opposite direction of where I would like to see it all go. :)
I hope, and suspect the community bots will not be for individuals to push their content to the top. More will hopefully he revealed soon.
Now, I must start the weekly curation league post :)
This is an interesting thought exercise. If everyone chose to delegate their stake to a bid bot, then there would be no flagging, and it would be a sort of wild place with free market effects. Here's the thing about bid bots:
What does this mean? Suppose that a bid bot, supported wholly by one whale for simplicity, has a vote worth 100$. Suppose the bids only fill to 50 SBD. This means the whale pockets 50 SBD for that round. Let's also suppose for simplicity that it's a 0 minute votes, so no curation is involved. 100$ worth of votes are distributed to the bidders. That means bidders collectively pocket 50$ as well, subtracting out their 50 SBD (let's assume the peg is working, again for simplicity. We can add it in but it detracts from the main point). From the point of view of the rewards pool, the net effect is that 50$ worth went to the whale and 50$ went to bidders. This is probably not new to bid bot users, but I included it for completeness.
Rather than the whale self voting for all of the 100$ vote value, we've got a nicer distribution. And that's really the theme behind bid bots: greater distribution than the strictly self vote picture.
Except... There's the very frequent scenario that bid bots are over bid. In this case the whale gets much more than the bidders, sometimes even leaving the bidders with nothing! I think this is more of an education problem than anything else. People simply don't understand bid bots and are getting screwed. This is mitigated by bot owners establishing caps on the bid bot rounds. But for maximal distribution, it should really be set lower than it is now.
If people were fully knowledgeable and rational, they would band together to milk the bot pools by taking turns in underbidding the rounds. This takes power away from the bid bot owners. Of course, this is also completely unrealistic. But there starts to be the potential for a free market over the rewards pool.
It's funny... Those people we see clogging up trending by use of overbidding on bots? They are literally bleeding money (unless they are actually making it up with real votes, but somehow I really doubt it).
So anyway, my point is there seems to be an education warranted for garbage trenders. Also, we can achieve the same effect by actually flagging overvalued trending posts to make their bid bot usage less desirable (given that they haven't figured out they are bleeding). Well, that certainly can't happen if everyone gave their stake away to bots ;)
Now about the state of this world. It obviously sucks. Nothing is driving community valuation of posts, so we may as well be running some weird form of universal basic income or something. So we must reserve some power for downvoting, and I think it becomes somewhat stable (in that bid bot and flagging becomes the way we arrive at the valuation).
Better if the algorithm is tweaked to give better community valuations of posts though. I have no idea how.
An extensive exercise, thanks for this.
They don't care it seems, it's for publicity only. The money isn't an issue to them, but it's going to the BB owner and the main delegator, right from the rewards pool.
I really do dislike 'wasting' VP on downvotes, but I agree we should all perhaps reserve some energy for it.
Thank you.
I have choosen to not use bots for promoting my posts. Totally aware that it will make me less visible but att the same time I will know that I have a genuine account. And also it makes it easier for me to compare posts since all reactions to them are from people.
I think this is a good choice - they call it 'organic growth' :)
@abh12345, for this you have my vote. Since I understood what witnesses are and what they are meant to do, I've been careful with my picks. I am under no pressure. I have only made eight votes as at now if I recall correctly. It's difficult getting to know the witnesses and who to vote for. But I've learned from their comments and posts you shall know them.
I personally don't think there's a solution to this bots problem simply because we are all humans with different mind sets and inclinations. Yes, it's made producing quality content and getting appreciated for it discouraging but it's not in my nature to give up. The climb has been slow but I will get there.
I think this bot problem will be your fight because we newbies are basically nothing on this platform. Someone called us idiots. I wasn't offended because the system has made us so.
But we can control who the witnesses will be.
For this, you have my vote.
Thank you.
'Idiots' is unfair, there is much to learn but someone who has yet to find all the information is not an idiot to me.
My stake is also tiny in comparison to others, but I think the point is to stick to what you think it right. It's nice to hear you are choosing your witnesses with care.
Wow! I'm so glad to have come across this post. I have been speaking out against bid bots for months, but I'm just a small fry with no clout. I've been telling people that these bots will ultimately harm the platform and people should simply stop using them. I also encouraged people to let the witnesses know that they would not vote for anyone who supported these bots. Nobody took any heed and people still flock to the bots instead of forming friendships and communities.
It is very encouraging to see someone of your stature saying these things and I hope many more will soon follow. Thank-you for looking out for the best interests of the platform rather than at short-term gain.
This is just the sort of reply I hoped to receive this morning :)
I'm glad to hear there are others taking this path, thanks for your support :)
Based upon the response I got from my own articles, there are several more who feel this way, however, it seems we are in the minority. For some strange reason, people prefer to chase the gimmicks rather than simply do what the platform was originally designed to do... interact with and vote for each other. As an example, take Steem Basic Income (SBI): for 1 Steem, you and someone you sponsor will receive a vote worth roughly 0.5 cent. If we assume Steem is valued at $2USD, it will take 400 posts just to recover your initial investment. At 1 post per day, and 365 days in a year, it will take more than a year just to break even! I have been sponsored twice and receive about 1 cent per vote for 2 shares of SBI and my sponsor spent 2 Steem to buy that, thinking it was a good deal. It is for me, because I paid nothing for it and obtain the extra votes, but for my sponsor, I think it is a terrible deal because that 2 Steem they paid is now gone and the sponsor must wait a long time to recover it. In the meantime, Steem could double or triple in value, yet my sponsor will not have that 2 Steem in their wallet, so they lose out on the increased value of Steem for that 2 Steem they are still waiting to get back.
Besides the loss of earning power, their own votes are 2 SP less! Instead of sponsoring me, my sponsor could have simply used their SP to vote for one of my articles and written a comment to which I would return a vote. My votes are worth 4 to 8 cents each (many times more than the vote from SBI), so their earnings would be far greater and without any cost outlay whatsoever!
I run a zombie adventure game that requires daily participation. Each player generally receives a 75% up-vote from me on a daily basis and there is another player with double my own SP that generally gives 100% up-votes to the players. People are earning quite a decent amount of Steem daily just for having fun playing the game, yet, I am shocked that so few are wanting to participate. I'm truly baffled by this phenomenon.
Hmm, this numbers are a bit disappointing to see - I know of quite a few people who are signed up.
I think visibility is what you need a bit more of, I wasn't aware of your game until just now and will go take a look..
When I first saw the SBI idea, I too thought it was worth looking into. Thankfully I had a sponsor who allowed me to see what the actual rewards were like. After doing some calculations and carefully reading what the creator of SBI wrote, I realized that the value of the votes will never increase because more people signing up just means the SP of SBI must be divided up between more recipients and everyone gets a smaller cut. The only beneficiaries are the owner and those who had been sponsored.
Visibility is absolutely everyone's problem starting out. I also started a web-store for people to list items that they want to buy, sell, or donate (Steems own version of kijiji) under the #happystore tag. It is a free service to allow people to post ads for items they need or want to get rid of. I thought that people would enthusiastically re-steem something like that to get greater exposure for such services, yet it struggles to find a larger audience. The way things are set up here make it difficult for innovative ideas to get exposure unless they are backed by a lot of money.
Please do take a look at the zombie game and join in if you think you may enjoy playing. There is also another game run by @daclawboyz that was inspired by my game and the Warhammer 40K game. His game can be joined at any point in time.
I will probably do the same
Good stuff dude, there is an investment of time to research them, I'll probably post about the places to look.
I think the biggest problem isnt bid bots, but the lack of manual curation here on the platform from whales or big investors.
Bid bots are just a solution to solving a problem. Instead of complaining about the bots their needs to be a better solution to the problem that they solve.
The rewards for delegating to a bid-bot completely overshadow curation rewards, this is the reason for the the vested SP moving to them and thus the lack of desire to manually curate.
I am so glad that somebody is standing up and making some noise. I think it is absolutely ridiculous that people can buy their way to the top. Steemit Has so much potential. It is sad to see the people with the most power taking advantage of the system and not helping those with lower steempower.
When I started on here three months ago the whales were still out voting. I remember getting my first whale up vote it was so motivating and encouraging. Now you have to buy the up vote. That is very discouraging and frustrating. Thank you for standing up. Keep up the good fight
Thank you - It is really only noise 'we' can make at present.
I hear many similar stories, whale votes in the past could inspire and motivate for months, and they are very rare these days.
My suggestion is to try to support the witnesses who aren't engaged in bots and who are focused on engagement and communities - I'm a little biased though :)
I think that is a great idea. If enough of us support Rhodes witnesses then we will be heard.
It is not that this is one of the bidbots but to buy the vote brings an untold loss sometimes I do not understand how a user pays hundreds of dollars a day so that the publications are trending without having lost ... and if they delegated all the Steempower to 1 only bidbots equally, there will be preference for a group because nothing can be legal should always see a black hand in everything, it would be worse, the remedy than the disease.
It can be unfair that one minnows spend time planning our quality post, so that it is not appreciated because we can not use bidbots for having a low budget.
I hope visibility of posts will be better when the Communities feature arrives. Good luck to you.
thank you.. my friend
Are whale groups any better than bid bots? With bid bots at least minnows stand a chance to promote a post. And whale groups are simply self proclaimed authorities on a blockchain that was developed to prevent authorities.
The answer is, they both aren't good :). Bid bot traffic I think gave somewhat higher variety than when I saw it dominated by whale circle jerks. So what is desirable? Why, trending that actually means trending! Real people, real engagement. I'm sure someone should be able to gather signals to create a better trending based on a combination of signals such as resteem, comment, vote value, and etc. Maybe it can be learned, and the community can rate how good trending is. Damnit I need to go read up on machine learning systems....
If machine can learn it to differentiate, human will certainly learn how to exploit what machine has learnt :)
It is continuous battle, but it is better than nothing.
Well together they don't consume as much of the reward pool, and this is a 'proof of stake' game we are in. While I don't self-vote, I can't blame people for doing so to a point. Buying votes for average content that is seen by new visitors, makes the place look ridiculous at times.
I agree about poor content. But what about a case where I spent at least 8 hours capturing and editing tutorial videos, spent 4 euros on transactions for it. Is it justifiable to promote such post with bid bots to get some visibility? Of course my 80 cents didn't do much, but I did try to get best bargain for every penny.
My author rewards from bidbots are profitable but are miles away from what I spent to produce this content.
Clearly you aren't going to have much of a negative effect on the rewards pool, or gain much more visibility with those bids, and on this scale there is an arguement that a boost into 'Hot' for your chosen tags is reasonable.
The problem arises when everyone is at it, 24 hours a day, across 100+ Bots, which has been the case since late last year. Large stakes have moved away from curation to these bots, and this is continuing to be the case.
If you are into video tutorials, have a go with utopian-io and look at anything open source. Dtube prefer people over screen capture imo.
Good luck!
I recall @paulag calculated that if all stake was voting, which it would be if it was all delegated to bidbots, the rewards pool would quickly dry up, and rewards would dwindle to exactly what could recharge each day at the current rate of inflation.
I do not know what impact that might have on content, and the society.
Pretty sure the trending page would not suck much differently that it does now.
Interesting thought experiment, though.
Thanks!
I see little hope for the Trending page, bots or no bots. The larger issue is with the rewards pool and the sharing of this resource, which is being increasing slurped up by accounts related to these 'services'.
Even if Trending / advertised posts can be hidden, this will still be happening in the background unless code changes or changes in mindset take place. I'm not holding my breath, as the (few) vocal accounts tied to these services continue to believe the are providing a good thing.
I am curious about your own use of bots. In the past you have purchased botvotes. You know I feel that harms Steemit, but also recognize the extant milieu in which it is done, so have not criticized folks that do it directly, including you. I do continue to work to inform people on the harm botvotes do, however.
Have you changed your practices?
Thanks!
I have purchased a lot of votes in the past Knowledge has helped me see the wrong in my doings.
Nowadays, 18+ million SP votes at 100% every 2.4 hours:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@abh12345/how-much-available-sp-is-there-for-steemit-com-content
At this point, I would rather it be done in secret, as the efficiency of going this route will never be as draining as the bot situation.
...Just wanted to read that again.
does it make sense? you have me worried now! :)
Of course! In fact, if wisdom like that doesn't make sense to the person being questioned, it's because he hasn't allowed himself to consider or accept a basic truth.
I just like the concise and open nature of that question. I've been the person unable to see or accept a basic truth before, and questions like that are helpful, even if uncomfortable. Growth isn't comfortable.
Ah great, phew!
It did take a little time to find concise wording, but I felt it important to do so to have the right impact.
Thanks for your thoughts on this 😊
I agree and will be paying close attention to those in higher places before they get my support.
Sounds like a plan to me, thanks for your support :)
I really like this idea, we need to hold witnesses accountable and these bud bots are ruining everything that was awesome about the platform.
Correct me if I’m wrong though, I was under the belief that witnesses have to keep the steem that they receive on the platform and powered up? I thought that was one requirement. So if you’re receiving 200 steem a day for being in the top 20, you need to keep that steem active. How else would you recommend using that 6000 SP per month? I know there are thousands of options available for delegating but after all, they want to make money, would be interesting to see if there is a balance
I've not heard that one? We (myself and paulag run @steemcommunity ) and will be trying to fund our witness server via the block production payments and Post payouts.
The top witnesses earn a lot of STEEM compared to monthly server costs. Even with the full shazam setup, you are unlikely to be paying more than $500 a month.
I hope this helps, cheers for your comments :)
I'm not sure where I read it, but I remember something about the Steem earned having to remain powered up for a certain amount of time. I might be mis remembering exactly what the rules are though.
Well hopefully we will be holding all SP rewards for a long time yet, and so if this is a rule we should be good.
If you spot where it is written please give me a shout or stick a message on one of our witness posts @steemcommunity, cheers!
Will do.
Have a good weekend bud
Cheers and you too!
Interesting - good that people are finally taking a stand against bots that are just harming Steem and taking way to much from the reward pool and sending it to low quality posts - this is like the opposite of the vision of Steem!
I think if all the bots were actually run and managed by humans then it would be fine - acutally reading and approving votes rather than just anyone getting upvotes - this doesnt work!
It can be hard with the blacklist too - Minnowbooster tried to make a stand a while back and ended up blacklisting so many people that didnt deserve to be blacklisted, while others slipped through the cracks
Thanks!
Even with manual approvers, they would still need to meet the demands of delegators and so the standard would be to suit these people.
Blacklist/Whitelist - pointless exercises.
Thanks. Its a lot more complicated than it seems on the surface. ..
There are certainly some good manual curators out there, but also lots more bots who appove anything
To be completely forthright, the reaction extremely shot him on the foot. On the off chance that the administration was great and useful, no reaction at all should sparkle a terrible light to smartsteem. Individuals ought to for the most part say something great in regards to it. Ita simply like requesting people groups conclusion about dlive, or dtube ...nobody would have anything pessimistic to state in light of the fact that these administrations serve for the better great. Without a doubt, he ought to be cheerful to get criticisms coz they will enable him to adjust his administration for more noteworthy's benefit of this group.
Fair comments :)
Interesting, it seems there are no big votes anymore as many people including whales are selling all there votes.
Yeah that's exactly what's happening. I need to join me one of those 'vote clubs' :D
We have a system that could be looked at, in my opinion spam accounts are a much bigger problem than bid bots. I don't mind bid bots, if you do your research on them at all, at best you can make slight gains over time, and most likely lose money in the long haul, as of right now. The bid bots are what they say they are, a carnival game that some people win, more people lose, and the house always wins. The bots are very appealing when you capture gains, but then you continue to use them and lose these gains on two bots that are rigged at that unlucky time of bidding. Can I ask also what is the difference between leasing steem or using a bid bot?
It's not about winning or losing as far as ROI with your Bid - It's about the % of the rewards pool that is shared by all being taken by the delegators and owners. Further to that, curation of quality content has disappeared as people have delegated to BB's.
The platform cannot continue forever with this model.
@abh12345 i m new on steemit..Steemit, Dtube, and Dlive Yesterday we all noticed some major (and some not so major) to our favorite Steem.
I'm not sure what you mean, sorry.
I use the bots and do think I would be a good witness if I had a server but I don't. I however do not think I will ever delegate to a bot. I'm extremely bullish on this platform long-term and want to be successful on it which is why I use bots. Right now it seems the majority of users have at least somewhat "given up" on this platform but I have not.
Delegation is really great explained well
It's a question that always haunted me
many many thanks for you give us many information about steemit and bid bot.
everything is happening with bots from the main core of the steemit that is engagement will be left behind
Yep. Voting bots shouldn't be allowed. Nor should self-voting. Then again, the change needs to be done in a HF, at central level, not by users trying to invent workarounds to compensate for bad system design.
I can't work out if the reply falls into the moot point category, or if there is a another term I should be using - like 'ridiculous'.
Yes, it's unlikely to happen, but the reason for this is down to people giving a crap and understanding the detrimental effect of these services. Hiding behind the ethics of people opposed to your service and using that as an arguememt against... ridiculous.
I'm finding i'm met with silence, or insults at present.
Still looking up for more support - Heimindanger is a good start but I think much more could do with raising their voice.