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RE: Vote Bot Takeover Musings & Open Forum - What Would You Like Me To Write About?
I personally do not use bidbots but I have checked out the website
and holy shit! There are lat least 60 bidbots in rotation atm and I imagine it's only going to increase. I think this is a major issue that needs to be addressed by steem inc. and by the community .
This only makes the strongest whale accounts even more powerful and it is encouraging a whole culture of people to follow suit. I don't look at the trending page often but when i do it is cringe worthy what is on display to the rest of the internet. From an outsider's perspective this garbage could be viewed as the BEST Steemit has to offer. Not good.
I totally agree with you! I think this bot culture is also demoralizing for new people who join the platform and spend their time creating content as they don't stand much chance of trending (and being seen by bigger audience). I would love to write more content on the platform, but there is not much point if it is going to be buried under pile of s*** posts within seconds :)
I agree. If you don't have a big following, no one will see your post. I have a lot of quality posts I would like to write, but I won't waste them when I still have less than 500 followers and few that read/comment on the posts I do have. My strategy has been to do great curation/commenting and support quality posts to help them get an audience and those I follow because of their quality posts. Eventually, I'll have a big enough following, say 1,000 where it makes sense to start posting my quality topics I think people could be interested in.
I also don't pay for or otherwise use voting bots. I'm a purest and it just seems like cheating.
Your strategy sounds good for the whole Steemit ecosystem. It is important to reward people who put a lot of work in their content. By supporting other authors whilst you build your own follower base and by making valuable contribution through your comments you are creating a more positive culture. Hopefully people will watch and learn. I will look out for posts from you :)
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.