Another post about downvotes

in #downvotes5 years ago

Wanted to clear some things out that I've been reading lately. I understand many may be frustrated about downvotes on their bid botted posts and keep bringing out a lot of excuses, the content, their powerups then moving onto looking at our activity, our history of selling votes and thinking that we're doing this because of some ulterior motives that may benefit us. It's getting pretty exhausting and while I'm not here looking for some sympathy cause I understand it's something that has to get done I just want to try make things more clear and our perspective on it.

Doing these downvotes is not something we enjoy, we are minding the content a bit more than we did in the beginning and giving out lower downvotes based on that but the main point is that being able to purchase profitable votes is unsustainable and unfair in more ways than just one to everyone on the chain.

Another crappy infographic here that I am not sure where I was going with but those who are not exactly sure of how Steem works under the hood, they need to know that the rewardpool is of one size daily and it shrinks every 250k blocks or so of how much Steem it generates. With the current inflation in 16-17 years there will only be around 750 million Steem in existence and the rewardpool will be giving about 16 times less Steem out daily.

As you can see, the buyer of bid bot votes is not only putting themselves out there for downvotes lately but at the same time sacrificing genuine curation because they decided to purchase votes. On top of that the bid bot now doesn't need to curate because it managed to sell a vote and will attempt to do so again, ON TOP OF THAT the other curator who only received 250 Steem in curation rewards looks at the bid bot owner and thinks "hmm why don't I just delegate to it if it gives me that much higher return" and we're back to pre-HF ideology except that we still have the curve and free downvotes.

Why do bid bots sell profitable votes? Because almost no one is interested in purchasing votes that will cost them for promotion or advertising at this point in time where there are not many users on the Steem front-ends that will view these posts. Why do they sell them even though they know they will be downvoted? Because they still make more returns than just from curation, they get your bid and half of the vote in curation rewards.

Seriously guys you have to try and understand here that being able to just generate a profit by sending a Steem transaction to another account no matter the content is something that happens no where on the internet. Remember those "send x btc and receive 5-10x back" scams? This is basically what's been happening on Steem on a smaller return scale and the only people getting scammed have been those not buying votes and all investors that got rekt by price going down cause this is not something that is sustainable.

Creating an economy where these kind of things is impossible is not easy, no one has done it yet and no one is even close but Steem is attempting to finetune it as well as it can but it can't just magically exist and be perfect. It needs some help by everyone and with the free downvotes we can finally regulate what direct the inflation to as a community so that everyone gets the most out of this ecosystem and not just those looking to extract value with as little to no effort just because they know who to buy votes from and beat others to it in the rounds.

Why are we doing this? What's in it for us?

I'm getting pretty sick at all the accusations, saying it's "politics", etc. OCD has been curating on the platform for over 2 years now, we released our bid bot late just to mitigate the ongoing abuse from the other bid bots that were only enriching the owners, the buyers and the delegators. We did that by only allowing curated authors that would provide decent content to purchase votes, took no cut from the delegations unlike most other bots and didn't use OCDB's upvotes for anything other than allowing the users in the whitelist to purchase them at a guaranteed profit.

We could have easily said "fuck the EIP" and continued to sell votes, our authors would surely have received some downvotes here and there but most likely not as much as the buyers from other bots that were unregulated/curated. We could have continued giving our delegators some of the highest returns while no other bid bot could match them and possibly been the last bot standing but that was not the right thing to do in our opinion.

We wanted to suppor the EIP and the unique proof of brain we have here for content discovery and a social media blockchain. There are plenty of proof of stake coins out there and delegated proof of stake, although most are still lightyears away from Steem's tech in my opinion why not go for the value proposition we've had since the beginning that the linear curve and rise of bid bots kind of ruined. I was never even much against the linear curve, we just needed free downvotes but the EIP was a package deal that compliment eachother and work better that way.

Anyway, without sidetracking much. We've decided to just leave short comments with a link to my previous post titled "why you may be getting downvoted" in our future downvotes on sold bid bot votes. We can't make bid bot owners be rational and sell unprofitable votes as they know they won't be getting any (selling these votes would make them spend less voting power and have more for curation but they don't care about that cause they want the bids even if it meant getting no CR even if the post gets downvoted to 0).

We are happy that many realize what our downvoting efforts are about, which again, we gain nothing from. In fact it is costing us a lot of time to attempt to "curate" bid botted posts while we still try to downvote the profit away and the amount of time that has gone to explaining to people that like to exaggerate and make a big deal out of it. We could easily have just stopped the bid bot and gone curation while letting our downvote mana stay at 100% like many other curation projects are doing, but this would also be wrong. That would mean we don't care to regulate our platform and want what's best for it, we would just want to be left alone and tend to our profits and growing our project while letting bid bots still reign free undermining the EIP and our currency.

Is it fair that we have to spend this much time and receive this much retaliation and drama in return when trying to do a good thing for the long term of Steem? If you believe us that we have nothing to gain from it personally or ulterior motives then I guess not, but we are okay with it and hope our other attempts at curating, building communities and attempting to bring in more content creators and consumers to Steem will outweigh this blip in what may be considered controversial until bid bots, their delegators or the majority of content creators who still purchase votes have come to their senses to realize that something like receiving a profit from buying votes is unrealistic.

It's only been a little over a month of the EIP and we are happy to see more bid bots turn curation and hopefully only sell votes that are unprofitable in the future if there is demand for actual promotion and advertisement onto trending.

Thanks for reading.

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Keep fighting the good fight!
It hasn't even been that long since the changes and I would say 95% of the people I've talked to like it. It's not even close.

I'm enjoying the curation going on, was planning on making a post about that as well later. Although many are just attempting to snipe instead of spread them around it's better than what they were doing prior. :)

The curation is really great.
Sniping can be very profitable. There are a few predictable whales to front run.

It's better than self voting and vote trading. The only problem is a lot of people are doing it on the accounts that are famous for that .
There are a lot of real abusers to continue to deal with first then maybe that can come after they've given up.

I've turned off auto voting off most personal accounts and am mostly doing it for initiatives and trails these days. It's only cost me around 10% in the last two weeks and since I don't have millions of SP, meh.

I've set my trail so it follow votes around 0.01 SBD which surely makes the minnows happy when they see that especially since I'm following a few very small ones. I wish I could increase it to 0.025 SBD so I need to buy more steem or vote for less. Let's see what happens.

Sniping the whales isn't as profitable as most people think it is. It's a competitive game. I'll let you in on a secret. Go for the second tier user, not the highest earners. The vote mass to front run can be much more favourably distributed. Also, if you find a post you think might become popular, give it a big upvote and resteem it to put more eyes on it!

I suggest anyone who doubts my words go and take a deep dive into the curation rewards on SteemWorld.

Actually on my trail votes I have fairly tight limits and avoid voting on people with too many votes or rewards automatically. Can't vote for everyone and the people with smaller payouts will notice it more.
I'll still manually curate whatever I lile regardless.

Most curators (people with money invested here) are in it for the money, not to find good content and get it seen. And under the new rules, it's very easy to make money curating. Just find a post that is above $10, and upvote it 100%, unless it's complete garbage. As long as it's not obviously a shitpost (picture of a flower and 2 sentences, for example) it won't get hit by downvotes, and you'll max your profits. Rinse and repeat.
In other words, most curators post H21 are just spamming their votes onto posts that already have lots of votes. That's not real curation, it's profiteering, and being called "NewSteem".

And under the new rules, it's very easy to make money curating. Just find a post that is above $10, and upvote it 100%

Yeah I don't need to read more from you to know how little you understand curation rewards.

At the end of the day, the growth of the community has to be a collective effort. As much as these downvotes may cause inconvenience, if it is something that must be done, then so be it. I finally got around to follow the ocd downvote trail as well as others who do it for a good cause. My initial fear for downvoting was the potential of abuse but that gladly hasn't happened to me or anyone I know of.

Your post was written in a professional and correct way, the essence is explained very nicely, I will try to give my opinion in a creative way.

I wrote about solutions but downvote is not a solution, nor is it a society based only on those who have a lot of Steem Power. The idea of ​​burning Steem is just a preventative measure in times of crisis, now the whole system looks like a war zone and not a social network. We get downvotes for introducing a wife, a kid, a brother and then you vote for them, so it's crazy. On social networks you have the freedom to give like to who you want, On Steemit you get downvotes for that. The trend pages do not resemble blogging quality, only the strong ones are there, those who are part of the lobby groups. If everyone were casting votes only to new users, then no post on a trending page would have more than $ 5 or $ 10. The same people get votes from the same people, those smaller fish get downvotes and at the same time offer to give their Steem Power as a delegation. The value of Steem can be raised if we have companies that accept it as a payment method if they give discounts on products and thus increase our turnover. We need to limit production to Steem, this should be a royal network, and other systems with other Steem tokens should be support for all people on this planet. Quality does not reach the top, if you donate $ 85 a product through a post, you again have no support, so it's really weird. I see this as just one attempt to get out of the crisis, but the whole concept is unsustainable in practice, an idea incubator should be created and all together put forward proposals that can bring us to the surface.

We have a situation that is utopia, you cannot support millions of people with 100 kg of gold, Steem has a limited source of value. Only the Steem platform and new tokens can increase the number of users and give the right support.

Instead of a downvote, I would introduce a ban from the list. I am sure there are many better business solutions, this is not a picture in which we all grow, in which we all have profit and positive energy. Steem is not a social network, Steem is a business social network and therefore it is necessary to create a model that gives positive energy and which has the power to attract new investors, companies, bloggers, etc.

The trend pages do not resemble blogging quality, only the strong ones are there, those who are part of the lobby groups.

Please refrain from painting everyone with a broad brush. Thanks for basically calling my work garbage, and no I'm not part of some frikkin' "lobby group." Instead of making it about me though, I could also point out plenty of others who've earned high trending page slots honestly today and in recent memory. How do you think they'll feel if they stumble across your message here today? Achieving that status honestly and organically was nearly impossible for two years and now you're attempting to take everything some people worked towards and flush it all down the toilet because you're having a bad day.

It's fine if you're one of these disgruntled members of the community and no you don't have to agree with everything and everyone but there's no need to throw everyone under the bus and attempt to make everyone look bad just to make a point. Speak on the facts and drop the sensationalism, please.

I see you're also actively downvoting people. One account received several downvotes from you today in a very short period of time. There's no possible way you could have consumed that content in that amount of time and made a fair decision when curating up or down, so it's obviously something else. If you're sitting here having a "war" with people, that is your business, your life — and your life and experience is not a direct reflection of the lives and experiences of everyone else here. You speak for yourself, not everyone else, so keep that in mind.

Instead of a downvote, I would introduce a ban from the list.

There were 44000 accounts already placed on a blacklist for paid vote abuse. You can't even show me 44000 accounts who's blog, as a business, benefited from using paid votes, but I can show you an entire list that size of people who abused it.

Those 44000 accounts blacklisted for abuse and ALL of the other members here purchasing votes hurt my blog, as a business. Burying my work and the work of everyone else who wanted to blog and earn honestly. The very action of someone purchasing an upvote would indirectly place a downvote on my work, since their behavior pushed my work down the rankings. Did ANY of these people care about all those they were indirectly downvoting when they purchase an upvote? NOPE! And they lied as well! Said it was about "promotion" and "visibility" yet suddenly, when there's no PROFIT involved, like magic, they no longer want to "promote" for "visibility" (the visibility they were taking away from EVERYONE ELSE). Go figure. They've shown their true colors these days, after two years of lies.

I'm under the impression the changes around here are about balance and fairness and needed to happen because things were not balanced and fair.

Watching people pout about taking away a dysfunctional system that worked in their favor, after they had spent two years gleefully taking opportunities away from everyone else around them, is like working at a daycare and being surrounded by toddlers.

Look at the posts from the trending list and see who votes for them, you will always see the same or a similar picture to most people.

This is yours - for me that's ok

Your text is not constructive because it is more like you are defending the views of these people who have the most Steem Power, and the facts show that. The point is to make Steem stronger, to get the quality right. The downvote is certainly not a good way, people are afraid, to tell the truth, and if someone is silent it does not mean it is good. Do not write to me, write a post for the benefit of all users. Give us constructive suggestions on how to raise Steem value without downvote?
I honestly want you to start making the most money with your good posts, but I'm not the subject of this conversation, all the investors, businessmen, bloggers, scientists, the poor, etc.

Be positive and come up with positive solutions, and look at the new posts there are those who are of extra good quality but are not on the trending page, this is because the natural selection of friendships and good relationships is crucial and not the post itself. I believe we will all emerge victorious when the whole truth unfolds in the right way when we find better and more positive solutions for our Steem family.

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Instead of a downvote, I would introduce a ban from the list.

Something to that effect will be possible in Hive Communities I believe, where members can be excluded from a community for not following its rules.

This is already possible, but not enforced a lot to my knowledge in tribes, where individual accounts can be muted, and will no longer receive rewards if they are.

Remember those "send x btc and receive 5-10x back" scams? This is basically what's been happening on Steem on a smaller return scale

That is probably the best way of summing up what has been going on with bidbot votes. Never mind all this promotion nonsense. It's for profit and that is all. These whining c*nts are doing my head in. Excuse my French :0)

your French is really good for someone from over the pond...

It is! It has a certain je ne sais quoi! :0P

I still haven't had an answer to my question about the difference between exchanging SPORTS for steem using sportsvoter and exchanging AFIT for Steem using actifit or Partiko points for steem using partiko. I want to know where you guys plan to stop with your vision of how steem should look

All tribes are equal, but some tribes are more equal than others.

haha that´s the same with the normal accounts !

I mentioned it a few times but people like the guys from OCDB and there Mastermind mr. acidyo don´t care about, they still going on to spam with their sportlists and other senseless things what milks the reward pool and trying to tell us they don´t do nothing bad when they play God here on steemit with their friends with the huge accounts.

Yeah they just want to throw sand in our eyes and distract us from the other activities of their private accounts, because there they continue as before.

There are other accounts who following in trails the downvotes from OCDB people, not knowing what happend out there with their votes.

This is not a harmless game, here people are punished because the OCDB guys think it has to be like this.

  • Who is the judge here ?
  • OCDB ?
  • Acidyo ?

They are certainly not the community, the community are the small accounts with less than 10k SP !!!

I guess it would be better if someone with a less dirty vest wrote such posts.
Zwischenlinie-2 für Steem-Post 940x120.png
with sunny greetings from Andalusia

Don Thomas

What I'm noticing is that none of these people from the brave newsteem world bother to reply to any comments that disagree with their world view. They don't engage or debate. Or tell us why our view might be wrong. Shutting down any dissenting voice by ignoring it.

I just get a little laugh out of these posts saying that downvoting is theft... ummm is it in your wallet??? No it’s not so quit cryin’ and take your downvote. It’s part of the economics of Steem. Sorry your circle voting is getting those rewards put back in the reward pool and distributed otherwise. Sorry you got caught abusing the system... wait no I’m not. I don’t even want to hear a word from someone getting a constant $15-$20a post, then getting downvoted to $10 and it’s the end of the world. Just be happy you get anything at all, if not head over to Fakebook and whine there and see what you get.

Posted using Partiko iOS

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I'm back at 100% Downvote power. Time to go and find some shit!

Hey, first...thank u for sharing this and second...I understand that downvotes are not for the bad cause and that is smart to find contest that are fake or plagiarism, and I respect people to do that, cus is not an easy job to do, but why are here downvoters without a real cause? They are not writing or curating or voting, just downvoting without any explanations....can we do anything against them?

Those are probably just bots following their votes, usually small in SP. There were some following ocdb as well in the beginning until we went manual curation, so there might still be some following other bid bots who are just curating.

Keep fighting the good fight! Ignorant people will always be ignorant. This post will help dispel some of that.

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