RE: Vote Bot Takeover Musings & Open Forum - What Would You Like Me To Write About?
That's the problem with trending being ranked by pending payout only, but I'm done tilting at that windmill.
The truth is most random users do start at Trending, because if you get to Trending you are statistically FAR more likely to get a much larger payout. The game now is you basically don't make anything on your posts unless you have cultivated personal relationships, gotten very lucky, or played the bid bots (generally at a loss after curation.)
The profit on operating the bid bots is enormous. Often well over 70% APR, though we are dealing with a small sample size as they aren't a year old. I'm composing notes on this for a future post, but suffice it to say that the bot operators (and delegators) are making far more than anyone else at Steemit right now.
Except maybe something like this:
The only restraining feedback loop I see atm is that the value of an upvote has fallen dramatically in the last few months - in percentage terms of SP it has gone from about 0.02% to 0.007%, but on payout (assuming 50-50) this almost doubles to about 0.012%.
On chainbb, being a forum, posts are bumped every time there is a new comment, so the front page of each sub-forum has a mixture of new stuff and the most discussed articles. One quite simple solution on Steemit would be have another category: trending, new, hot, promoted aand discussed.
Of course, we will then see the auto-comment bots rise and a new game-cycle begin.
In essence, any encoded rule must (should) have a built-in negative feedback rule. If it doesn't, then the game will spiral towards some attractor that may limit its profitability at the global level, such as a steep rise in recent_claims and fall in reward_balance.