Why Not Mark them as Ads?
I mean, that's what they are right? When someone has paid for views, they are advertising their post, so why not differentiate those posts with a small note that says "Ad".
This is how google manages having organically crawled content results and "paid for" ad spots on the same page. Why would Steemit not also do this?
I am not a coder so I don't have the code to suggest and I may be off here because of my limitations in this area, but it seems to me that it would not be that difficult. The promotion bots are known and if you've been here long enough you can quickly tell by the top votes of a post, that it is there because someone paid for it to be there. If your new, you might just think you have a real chance to compete with this content until you learn what is actually going on.
I would think that this would be entirely doable. The bots can't really get very far without advertising their services, so it would be hard to fly under the radar. Also, if you take into account how many people are concerned about this issue, you could easily have the community pointing out all the bidbots to manage anyone trying to avoid the "Ad" mark.
What is the Long Term Value Proposition for Vote Buying/Selling
When I have used the bidbots, I knew that I was advertising my content to get more views and it worked very well. For the short term, it is profitable for me to do this. My problem with it, however, is that over time, this will continue to put lower quality posts on the trending page and take us away from the whole proof of brain concept. I thought the content I promoted was great or I wouldn't have done it, but that is nothing compared to the system that was designed to reward content.
https://steem.io/steem-bluepaper.pdf
Proof of brain goes out the window with the bid bots, so we are getting away from the mechanism that we have for "establishing and evaluating content's social value." Are there any whales that give a shit about this? I don't think reddit could have achieved the popularity it has if it was pay to play. Who would go to look at the front page of the internet if it was predominately covered in ads? Much less ads that aren't even marked as ads!
So I admit that I have gained from using the bots. I think it's important to say that so that so you know I am not just complaining because I feel left out. I, like most dolphins and especially whales, have the STEEM and SBD to take advantage of the bid bots, but when I think about the long term effects, that overrides what short-term gains I can make from it.
You are not missing something. You hit a home run. The bid bots suck up all the power there is and it is a surefire way to ruin the steemit as we knew it to continue using them.
Hello @richardcrill
When bidbots were Introduced, i felt that they were a way of getting publicity for a post. It seemed harmless then but overtime the real issue started to rear its head
Death of the community.
One of the things I noticed is that promoted post most times get low engagement. And the authors in most posts fail to even reply comments as there are no incentives to do so.
I use bidbots from time to time but I know that the long term effects kills the short term gain.
What made this matters worse was the option to delegate to voting bots.
This is removing more Steem for organic curation. This will overtime increase the demand for bidbots. And this kills the sense of community as things gets grossly automated.
Community members will see no need to truly Interact.
Marking promoted posts as ads will help, but I don't think it is possible unless they find a way to make them appear in the original promoted page.
@ogochukwu
True. I have heard of new people with not much steem power at all delegating to these services. That's a good indicator of how out of control this is getting.
When I first got here three months ago I saw that Steemit had a promoted post category. I learned shortly thereafter that it wasn't very popular, or was looked down upon for some reason.
Enter the vote bots. For some reason, they were filling the role that the promoted category was not. I'm still not sure why that is. If there's a stigma attached to post promotion, why doesn't it also apply to vote bots?
I am in agreement with you that the long term health of Steemit and the entire Steem ecosystem is not through the bots. I've also believed that something should show in the post listing if bot/bots have been used.
I don't know if it's even possible, but what I would like to see is the net reward if bots are used. I find the reward total to be deceiving if the writer has paid for the votes.
Most of us who have been around for a while know that the trending pages are filled with bot voted content. But the new people just coming in don't and probably won't figure that out for at least a week or two unless they get someone shepherding them early (or they're pretty observant).
I don't think the promoted tab was ever looked down upon, it just wasn't looked at very much at all, lol, The bid bots started with randowhale about 8 months ago, but have been ramping up ever since. Yeah the net rewards are probably about 10 or 15 percent of the rewards a post gets when it has been promoted to the top.
I've been suggesting the same for nearly three months.
It's only getting worse. I don't have any problems with advertisements in general.
Some members promote with a small amount, they receive their vote, and that vote acts like a flag and pushes the other content away and makes it invisible. Those members using small amounts can never seem to ween themselves off and rob themselves of ever being able to earn from their posts the organic way. If they do earn and since they see it as an investment, any capital gain from those posts where bots were used becomes a pain in the ass at tax time and they end up losing yet another percentage of what they earned whereas those earning organically do not have this issue.
Now some members are going overboard and taking up to four slots of the trending page to themselves. That acts as a much larger flag. The opportunity to have posts viewed simply because they are popular is gone. It's almost to the point where truly popular content has been outlawed here and replaced with advertisements.
Typically, on blogging platforms, the content producers EARN ad revenue. Here, the content producers work, they pay, and someone else earns the ad revenue. They are doing it backwards and this contributes to content producers leaving and also helps to keep people away since there's no other place on the internet that forces people to pay just to say hello.
At least marking the ads as ads would be a step in the right direction. It would help someone like me curate content. I don't vote for promoted posts for the same reason I do not pay Walmart for leaving a flyer in my mailbox. I still view some ads though and I do take interest in their promotions because that's how ads work. That's how they've always worked. Making everything an advertisement doesn't work. That's why we don't have channels that only show commercials on TV. We have things like home shopping channels and those typically have low ratings.
Well said. You hit the nail on the head with those last two paragraphs.
That's an interesting take.
We have an entire feed for "promoted" content.
We could label it. We could also just put it under the promoted tab.
PS This Steemit Plus interface is great. The social voting for human, bot, spammer is amazing. It should be a standard Steemit feature.
Yeah, honestly thats where it should go so no one would have to see it, lol. Yeah, SteemPlus is tha shit!
To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.
Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvote this reply.
oh wow, that's pretty cool!
Reply to this comment if you want me to resteem your last blog post to my 32,500+ followers. Then go to my Comments and reply to any of my comments on other steemians blog posts whenever you make a new blog post if you want to resteem it. Please upvote this comment after I resteem your blog post. @a-0-0
In my opinion on this topic definitely we will going to hear two voice one against of BID BOTS and one in favor of BID BOTS, i personally never used BID BOTS and also don't have any interest for future because in my opinion content should be community driven means with organic up-votes of people instead of in organic way but next question is the base of Steemit is nothing but an project which is running on Investments, so base consists the Business Oriented aspect, and people who have huge amount to spend, in my opinion they are delegating or promotiong their work through BID BOTS, so here nothing is wrong or nothing is right, but what i am thinking we can do one thing if possible, as we have promotion section on Steemit, same way can we add BID BOT PROMOTION SECTION, and these BID BOT promoted content should be only available in that section and remaining content should be categorized as per organic up-vote system so that people who are Business Oriented for them we can create an section called BID BOTS Promotion. These are my opinion. Thanks for sharing and wishing you an great day. Stay blessed. 🙂