I Tested Steem Bid Bots For A Week - Here's What I Learned
Bid bots are a way to inflate the rewards on the Steemit platform. I used the word "inflate" and not "increase", because bid bots are an "artificial" way to generate revenue, as opposed to the "organic" way to get rewards, by being upvoted by your regular followers.
How Does It Work?
Before diving too dip, I would like to recommend @yabapmatt excellent https://steembottracker.com. You will get a much more appealing image of what bid bots are than the brief description that follows below.
Basically, there is a time window of 2.5 hours between two bid bots, roughly the amount of time necessary to regenerate the actual bid account voting power. It seems that all bid bots are using the same time frame and they split their "rounds" into 2.5 hours chunks.
During any of these "rounds" or "sessions" you can send a certain amount of SBD / STEEM to the bid bot operating account and wait for the end of the round. Other users can send tokens as well, and that will dilute the potential voting power. Each bot also has an upper limit (cap) and a certain ROI (Return of Investment). There are also some other parameters, like the age of a post that can be voted upon, wether or not the bot will post a comment about voting that content, etc.
So, based on the bid bot max cap per round, its ROI and the numbers of bidders, you will get a vote. That vote will increase your initial investment with a certain amount.
Most of the time, in my experience, this amount is between 5% and 7%.
So, if you bid $10 worth of STEEM/ SBD, you will get back between $10.5 -$10.7 worth of STEEM AND STEEM POWER! It's important to understand that the rewards you get by using bid bots are still following the normal STEEM voting algorithm (so half of it will be in STEEM POWER).
How The Test Was Conducted?
For a week, I tried about 4-5 bid bots, based on various criteria: the max cap, ROI and wether or not they were publicizing their activity. The posts were just random posts that I write here (mostly market snapshots). I sent the bids around 1 hour after the post was live. The amount I sent was between 5 and 15 STEEM.
What Have I Learned?
There are a few cons and pros to bid bots (in their current form).
Here's what went well:
- the fact that you can increase the revenue with a predictable amount is tempting
- the fact that there is a (very rough) way to bid for user attention is encouraging
Here's what I consider not too well:
- there is no "intrinsic" value to the posts that are being upvoted by bids, so you can end up with a simple thing, not worth anything under normal circumstances, taking out a certain part of the reward pool
- because of the inconsistent publicizing of the bod bot vote, I noticed the rise of another type of bot (mind you) that is commenting on the posts upvoted, stating that the value of the post is not from organic curation. Under "normal" circumstances, I think bid bot votes should be public, so a post can have some sort of a "bid bot sponsored" badge. In line with this idea, I think the "sponsored" posts (those using bid bot votes) should have a different way to be displayed, not mixed with organic voted content.
Conclusion
I see bid bots as an intermediary evolution stage of attention bidding mechanisms on Steemit. In their current form they are way too rough to provide value to the ecosystem and they are only drawing a certain amount of reward pool to people willing to use them. Please understand that I have nothing against getting an ROI on your investment, but if the only form of influencing the user attention is money, then Steemit will be no better than Facebook, or other social media platform that are selling advertising.
I do think that, as time goes by, there will be a lot to be learned from bid bots and they will eventually evolve into something less toxic.
I just don't know how long this will take.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
Wanna know when you're getting paid?
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I know the feeling. That's why I created steem.supply, an easy to use and accurate tool for calculating your Steemit rewards |
Oh and you also didn't mention that for most, bots are a LOSS of money, after curation.
you put in say, 10 and get 11 back, seeming like 10% roi, except after curation, 25% smokes and you get 9 and change. you lost money. And if you wait a week for it and it was this week, you spent 10 at 90 cents per steem to get 9 at 60 cents per steem.
Bots are a PROMOTIONAL boosting tool, NOT a profitable game, unless you are incredibly careful and... very lucky.
I've used smartsteem in the past and don't worry about the dollar value as it's irrelevant. Look at the steem amount and you tend to get about 10% back on top of your transfer after curation. Direct post payout. It's win win, gain some publicity and make a return. I would rather if there were no bots but since there are it makes sense to use them.
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Some of them have 5-7% ROI after curation. I don't remember exactly which ones, but I remember I did the math back then.
With that being said, there is a consistent chance that you will lose money, like you said, not only after curation, but because of collusion of many bids or, like you said, because of market conditions.
Given the inherent nature of rewarding on Steem, I'm highly doubtful bots will ever disappear or even become a minority force.
The question is not how to eliminate bots, but how to eliminate bad bots and what are bad bots in the first place.
Especially because, given my own example, there are users who prefer automatically rewarding users through upvotes, instead of giving it on an organic base.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I did try some bots when I just created my account last year as I wanted to learn and understand all the options Steemit was offereing but after my short experience I decided it was not worth at all. Of course my account had also extremely low reputation back then but at the end of the day I believe the ROI you can get from real content creation and interaction is far bigger than the one you can get with bots. Of course you can just do both, but the "image" you may transmit to your audience is also a side effect to consider
accurate, but i cant help myself, every time I see this fallacy, I must correct it.
STEEMIT is not steem - steem is a hundred dapps that are awesome and we should never speak of steemshit.com again. It's an embarrassment to the blockchain.
A blockchain is everything it is part of its ecosystem, the BP's the protocol, the users, the DApps... It is good to understand and analyze all its players and options. Nothing is perfect but that does not mean we cannot improve it, use it, promote it and try to avoid the "not so interesting" parts of it. I have nothing against bots, the best way to avoid them if you consider not good for the project, is to understand them.
Also accurate, and the first step to understanding this chain, is decoupling stinc's reference prototype, now on its last legs from the amazing things going on all over it elsewhere, built by witnesses and users like Dragos and myself here and many many others.
We're some of the ones losing sleep and skipping meals for days on end in attempts to save this place before it's too late, over on github lobbying for chain and condenser code changes to benefit users, building tools and new dapps, building huge communities of users and teaching them how to operate in this environment, aiding in encouraging young users to mitigate our dismal retention caused predominantly by issues only possible on this ONE interface, and hosting and speaking at conferences and attending meetups to educate on the street and everything we can more or less, and far less prevalent on any of the other dozens of ways to use it.
I'm pretty assured that Dragos didn't do this experiment for himself, he already knew the situation and understood the bots. He did it to document it for newcomers and to prove some points, which are in turn being discussed and elaborated on here. I know this, because he and I have been here a long long time now and discussed much of this before. We spend time in the witness channels, we know the bot owners and their funding whales. We speak to them. We know why they do what the do, and what the math is.
The main problem is we have people coming here who DO not do this homework and it will never make sense to them. They are the ones leaving then to give a bad rep to the whole place. When if only they had never seen stincs crappy site, they would have never heard of bots or rep over on dsound or zappl or whathave you.
This is evidenced by the 10000 times a day I have to teach "steemit is not steem" to people like the gentleman on this very page who asked "so this is ok with the makers of steemit? and is guaranteed ?"
WE (including that misguided inquirer) are the makers of this chain. Steemit inc needs to go shut down and leave us alone to do the work.
Here, as in any other life environment, there are all kind of users. Some understand the technology and others don't. Some may not even have the tech knowledge to learn about it or just stumble upon the "wrong" mentors. I do not like some of the "not so clear" slogans bot creators use to try to catch its users the same way I do not like all the liers out there in the traditional trading markets telling people they will get rich in a month if they open a trading account and start trading. It is just the way things are and the best way to fight them is to ignore them or try to make their life much more difficult changing the "game rules".
We are on the same boat here.
On my testing experience using bots for several months you always end up losing. On rough number it seems you make good ROI, but when you take into account loosing 25% to the Bot, you are only left with 75% of face tokens value which always end up being less than what you input
Very good for marketing at low cost. But Steem Audience is to narrow, yet at 1 million users. I hope hard fork 🍴 HF20 helps to solve the complexity problem of creating new accounts.
Bots are good for marketing but not for making money. The owners of bots are the ones who get good ROI.
There is one more important con: reputation. You can inflate your rep basically by combining being in a perpetual state of powering down and pumping around the same money over and over. The older the max allowed age for a bot, the faster you can pump around the same money, the faster you can artificially inflate your reputation. My rep on my primary blogging account is 56 after over a year of blogging my fiction. 52 on my dev account that is a few months younger. There are bot-using spam bots half the age of my youngest accounts that already have close to 60 rep to their name without it seems even one single genuine upvote as far as can be quickly assesed.
The big problem with this is that ik makes self regulation a big problem. If I were to spent all of my voting power to flag a spammer for a week, I'll cost that spammer two maybe three dolar at current rates. I'll know though that because of the bidbots, my flags wont put a dent in their rep and likely in a few months that spammer will have a higher rep than me and will then be able to flag me out of existance in retaliation. Result : I (and others that would be tempted to fight the spam) will think twice before using my SP to try and help clean up the platform. It is cool that there are powerfull initiatives like @spaminator, but even @spaminator has only 66 in rep, a rep I think not unachievable for a persistent bid-bot user with some funds to pump around.
Did you miss the entire drama surrounding @transparencybot?
Apparently so...
yeah, that was a thing, and its spam and such like it, is a bigger problem for witness and rpc node memory and disk waste than the bots are.
tell me about it :( My block log is now more than 200G (yours too, I believe) and it's growing day by day.
Yep, times 2 with the backup.
2.4 hours, to be specific. 10 votes (well, 100% divided by bidders, to amount to 10 100% votes) per 24 hours.
I stopped using the a few months ago and I couldn't be happier. One thing you didn't mention is that to make your bid profitable via bid bots the price of steem has to be going up! And for this reason most of the time you won't see an actual bang for your steem, but your're gonna be in the red about 5-20%.
precisely sir.
any updates on HF-20 ? what do you think about that so far ?
I see they just released it, good times. Will write a post about it shortly.
ok , thank you
I've tried an upvote bot once, felt guilty about using it afterwards and don't think I will try it again. I just can't get behind the idea of paying for a vote instead of working hard to legitimately get my words in front of people and letting them decide if my work deserves an upvote.