RE: Please ignore my downvotes
"The Medium is the Message." And the information contained in upvote bots is that people want more exposure than their organic network and their investment in community building and reciprocity have gathered. This also provides stability in the markets for SP delegation. Without vote buying, there would be way more concentrated power in the ancients and less fluidity for the best to move up. Vote buying also helps the rule makers better identify those who do not add but only take.
I still don't understand why not just accept spam/upvotes purely for value with no to little proof of brain and let that be done at a certain lower rate if they are cooperative about it. But if they try to counterfeit then punish. And then compensate anything that passes as sufficient proof of brain at a higher rate. That way at least a lot of the spam market would instantly be destroyed?
I don't understand interventions that try to go upstream of market forces instead of not being a dick.
I am not going to be making spam or anything. But I will not respond kindly to downvotes. I am actively creating free video lessons and content released public domain so anyone can use it anyway they want. Business is done on the margins, so only so much of an expected payout can before it will become unprofitable to continue doing that and just have to leave if this culture develops.
How is the time vampire of your bot testing not equally as fucked up as spam?
Why can't these rule makers focus on making a great platform rather than fucking people over?
furthermore this is likely to just push the vote buying underground? How are you going to monitor MinnowBooster or other entrepreneurs? It seems like absent some other intervention your intervention if successful is just going to drive the vote buying you dislike underground so it will be harder for you to monitor and affect than it was currently? And all the external actors that are going to have to pay higher search and transaction fees trying to use the higher priced markets due to your intervention attacking market centralization will only hurt minnows and dolphins who lack bargaining power and are likely hurt most from information asymmetries.
I humbly ask you to consider whether you intervention really has a good likelihood of affecting steem in a positive manner? I seriously don't think so, especially if it is across the board downvotes rather than only ones with insufficient proof of brain.
I just created this post asking for input on three different down-vote bots. I've made some major changes, both to the voting power strategy and to the previously indiscriminate part of the vote bot upvote attenuation. Most notably the added use of the age of the post being upvotes prompted by grumpycat's recent downvoting activity where he distinguishes between early bot aided " promotional" use of self upvotes and late bot aided "money making" self upvotes. While grumpycat uses a surrogate (the voting bot used allowing late usage) my bot will use the actual post age itself, so reducing the false positive rate to zero. Please have a look at the whole blog post to understand my project. I'm sure you will see the good these bots will do, and maybe you could even add a bot idea of yourself.
so much reading, have to edit some video and get up new content but I'll try to process more of what you are doing. Thanks for listening to me ramble. Hope the New Year has been going well for you!!