RE: Dear Bidbots: Thoughts after the hardfork
There is no reasonable justification for bid bots when promotion mechanism can be cooked into a front end easily. Just needs to be a popular front end.
They are a vistigial structure no longer needed like snake stumps but their apologists will continue to try and perpetuate the lie that they are somehow good or an asset.
They are not. And I would say most likely the apologist has his or her hand in the cookie jar as well.
That's why I have mixed feeling about @aggroed as it seems he speaks out of both sides of his mouth at times.
This language I thought was peculiar
You, bid bot owners,
Considering @aggroed himself owns @lovejuice so I'm kind of at a loss as to why he would phrase it as if he were not among the group he is addressing.
I am tempted to think it's political maneuvering as if he wants to purport that he is not "one of them" and it seems to be working based on other responses.
I don't necessarily like to stir up shit but something isn't sitting well with me here.
The promotion tools were always broken, but they were actually meant to be one of the important ways to bring back value to the community. Right now the bidbots are just devaluing the community by pulling out money and becoming so filthy rich that they control the whole thing. I agree that voting down posts in trending that use bidbots (any bidbot) might be a way to do it. Maybe just start from the top every day.
I have never really flagged anyone for the last three years, but I have become a bit tired of the state of things.
I can see where you're coming from a little more clearly now. If he starts actually downvoting stuff that I would probably downvote myself, I would be happy with that as compared to before. It's incremental progress that we can build on. If this is just signaling virtue to prop up his own bot, my respect meter would drop appropriately. I would hope that his threat against bid bot abuse would include actually collaborating with the existing community already working towards that end.