Evening thoughts on bidbot and badbots

These last days I have recovered a bit of my entusiasm for Steemit. I was in a pretty bleak mood when I wrote this post: Stopit Steemit - and I was actually on the brink of leaving. Arming the people with some free downvotes and making it even harder for the small account to make some Steem didn't sound like the right way to turn things around.

But I guess I was wrong. People talked, the #newsteem slogan caught on and people had actually started downvoting even before the fork. A page like this one directed at the tedious, evertrashy trending page made it possible to concentrate the attacks.

Today I even had a hard time downvoting. Most of the projects were actually OK, it was just people buying promotion the only way they knew of. (Luckily there was still a @fyrstikken selfvoted comment). @Smooth downvoted, but also politely explained to people why... and they took it nicely.

So, what is it that have worked? Is it the social engineering tech solution that makes system developer wet their pants, or is it simply a community coming together in the eleventh hour to save their investment - (both cultural, social and monetary investments)? It is probably a bit of both, but I believe it is mainly a question about community - it did help to arm the local militia though.

Bidbots or Badbots!

A lot of the talk has been about vote selling, peoples right to use the system for private enterprise promotion offers, the inevitable fairness of a free market etc. Take a look on this post by @theycallmedan for example: To Bid Bot Or Not To Bid Bot, That Is The Question. I have looked around at all the arguments and finally I think I have found out what I think is the problem with the vote selling bidbots and their business model.

I'm not against seeling promotion. I will have a Kickstarter with my comic about Phill from GCHQ (Yes, that was promotion), and I would be glad to use some steem on advertising. But, the problem with the bidbots is that they use a system that was not meant to be used that way.

The reward system of Steemit is a method of distributing Steem in a way that will seem fair to Mr. and Mrs. Hamsandwich. When you start using that for promotion you will simply destroy a principle that is fundamental not only to Steemit, but to the whole Steem ecosystem. The reward, the number with an $-sign in front of it, can not both reflect what people find is a reasonable amount of talent and hard work, the white paper guarantied main concept of Steemit: proof of brain, and at the same time reflect how much money you drop in the bot slot.

Proof of NoBrainer (my own drawing).

It starts with a public library. People feel proof of brainy in such a place. Then a burger joint puts in a stall in the main hall. The Library management are progressive people who think it might be OK to let the burger entrepreneurs stay, I mean...who wouldn't like a BigMac after having lend Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Robert Musil?

So the burger joint stays and it evolves into a rather large place. They rent some of the rooms in the library, they do attract a large crowd, but not necessarily readers of books. Slowly the people who came at the library starts complaining, and then they start to leave. Burgers and books are not opposites, but people shouting orders, customers getting into brawls, the smell of synthetic vanilla from the awful milkshake...!

In the end the municipality will have lost a library and worse they lost a lot of readers who also was an asset for the city in many other ways, and they gained something that could be outside of the library, so that people with bags full of Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch can buy their happy meals on their way home.

The problem is that the promotion should be another place on the page. Not here:

And this is actually a design flaw that can be corrected. Good to see the large bidbot owners who are already now changing their business model. Let's have promotion that actually work without trashing the network.