State of OCD
I was going to make this post a few days ago already but some personal problems came in the way. I'll try to keep it brief and explain my perspective and would love to hear the thoughts of others about this.
The EIP and bid bots.
As you know, compared to most other bid bots @ocdb was working on manually curated authors only, so the odds that they would get downvoted compared to 90% of garbage that bid bots sell their votes on usually, we would have had a good chance to operate without seeing much downvotes and possibly been one of the last bots standing while everyone was starting to downvote bid botted posts. The reason we did not continue selling votes is because it undermines the EIP and makes it unfair for the rest of stakeholders and authors.
As an author you get less rewards due to the curve if your post doesn't make it to 20 steem post rewards, same thing goes for the curators and they'll only make curation rewards from honest voting.
As an author using bid bots you get an unfair advantage because they return profitable votes to you no matter the content and at the same time delegators receive both the bids and curation rewards (such was the case with the non-profit @ocdb at least).
So as you can see, anyone buying ocdb votes was directly taking rewards from anyone who didn't, both authors and curators. This is because the rewardpool only consists of a certain amount of Steem daily/weekly.
Same thing is true today, those buying bids, if they don't get downvoted, are directly taking rewards from everyone else who didn't.
Since @ocdb went fully manual, we have been downvoting posts that receive purchased votes for this main reason. There are many others attempting to do the same, the psychology is changing fast with things such as even if your post is worthy of all the upvotes, it is still unfair to curators to get the majority of rewards from bid bots. Same thing with promoting your post, it can just be a cover to gain that ROI over everyone else so if it's mainly for promotion then you won't get flagged if you burn part of the rewards to not make it profitable for yourself.
Bid bots that we have been targetting have been: upmewhale, rocky1, sct.voter, steemmonsters, appreciator and bdvoter. The good news here is that most people with common sense have stopped using them, so much so that these bots have started curating seeing their voting power constantly idle. Most bids still going on are usually from posts older than 2-3 days on garbage content, but as I mentioned above, the content doesn't even matter at this point cause the bid bots, due to how little competition there is for votes, are always giving profitable votes to authors which directly means they are making more than their original bid, giving bid bot owners and their delegators more returns and undermining the EIP.
There is always a cost to pay when you stick your neck out to downvote these posts, I was fine with it and didn't make much noise when the first downvotes started occuring on my posts from a 1m sp+ korean account because we downvoted him due to very concentrated curation on himself and a couple other accounts only. I also didn't care much when some bid bot owners started retaliating on my posts because of the first ocdb downvotes on their customers.
Now they seem to have banded together though to downvote the compilation posts of @ocd which go 100% to the curators and that does not seem very fair to me. The reason I say banded together is because they all seem to be doing it around the same time:
Before you get all "it's their stake they can disagree on rewards like everyone else does", well, if that was the case that would be alright with us.
Matter of the fact is we noticed early on into the EIP that the @ocd posts were getting a lot of rewards and toned it down so we don't hog trending constantly. We used to give a 10% vote per nomination and decided to change it to a more focused and quality 6 posts per day compilation and once there is more worthy underrated and deserving authors over time we could branch out to more posts. Once we realized that certain bid bots (who are now downvoting us instead) were curation sniping the posts because they were forced to curate when the bids were running dry, we decided to stop self-voting as we were making around the same amount of rewards now to reward the curators for their efforts.
This is what the posts look like now, bear in mind I haven't been voting much on the @ocd posts myself until these attacks started occuring:
So here's what I'm wondering now.
Do these bid bot owners think that they can intimidate us with these downvotes? It's pretty obvious by now that if @ocdb wasn't downvoting them, many other accounts in favor of the EIP would instead. How would they retaliate towards them?
As I mentioned earlier, ocdb was in the beginning (when we were still a "bid bot") breaking off voting rings that were mainly rewarding eachother, even though we have plans on going back towards that in the near future, we figured bid bots were a much bigger issue for now.
We never downvoted these bid bot votes to 0, it is only meant to make them as profitable as curation is.
Bid bots need to change their ways, the time for easy rewards with others delegations while making this platform a mess is over and even if ocdb were to stop downvoting them, others wouldn't. They have to become a hybrid were idle vp is used for curation and if they want to sell votes for promotion they need to make sure the posts are burning some rewards or are young enough to actually affect hot/trending or don't give the authors a profit. Advertisement and promotion doesn't give you a direct ROI this way anywhere, it is not sustainable and it comes to a cost for everyone else on this platform. Promotion has been their main excuse for over two years now and it's pretty obvious by now that barely anyone uses them for promotion, most of the posts ocdb flags are older than 1 day.
OCD has always been rewarding it's curators with these post rewards, they aren't just a list of "what we have done today", they consist of descriptions of the posts and authors and we have a lot of followers that follow our accounts to find these new authors we highlight. We are not going to negotiate with threats of bid bot owners. We have not countered these downvotes with the @ocdb account as we want to keep them separate, but I figured this is something the community should know as many have been asking me lately why the @ocd posts are getting downvoted.
OCD is not the only curation project that rewards their curators with post rewards, just because @cervantes and other curation projects aren't using their downvotes to assist the platform and the EIP it seems very unfair for our curators to face these retaliations and threats. Even if we were to adapt to another form of rewarding our curators, do you think this is where it ends? It wouldn't take long until they would instead retaliate on our manual curation just to get us to stop downvoting their bid votes they are double dipping with.
If any of the bid bot owners are reading this, I want you to know that every downvote cast from @ocdb has been on my order, so if you want someone to retaliate on, feel free to do it on my posts. Doing so to curators who work hard to find these posts and have nothing to do with this sounds like some collateral damage you don't want hanging over you.
I mean, come on, it's getting pretty ridiculous when bid bots are selling their votes through other bid bots cause that's how desperate they are to earn more rewards than everyone else and undermine the EIP and proof of brain.
100% of the rewards on this post going to @ocd for the team of manual curators that have been affected by these downvotes.
Theres nothing to be alright here about. Its obvious, slimy retaliation.
Haha. Wolfie is a sneaky puppy. I mean, all this is expected. They need to maintain their ROI or they lose the delegators and investors. When that happens they lose their influence on the platform.
Without Smartsteem Wolfie is just a Orca with dev skills. In old Steem he was a powerhouse.
You just have to push through and yes, i think they should be downvoted far beyond the threshold of profitability. If you prick them a bit and the loss over what they would get from curation is lets say 10%, they can live with that and try to retaliate. They can sustain the retaliation longer. But if the loss is 70% then you cut their time in which they can do business by a much greater degree.
They are businesses after all, with responsibility to their investors, and they cant keep it up as long as OCD can.
The only continued proof of brain that I really see in some of these ongoing circles is proof of nepotism.
Very proud to be an @ocd curator since day 1. We will continue to curate original content creators no matter what. A few flags don't scare us! :)
If you didn't do it, I was already thinking of doing it myself even though my account was going to be affected as soon as possible. I've been watching everything, I like to have tests and analyze the behavior of certain things, I only see here envy and resentment, that's all I can say. It seems that people do not understand that we are in the #newsteem and that we must all adapt and accept certain changes, it is unfair that a team like ocd have to be paying for doing things right.
At the same time you (ocd) create new initiatives of participation for the community and new opportunities for growth, and at the same time they attack abuse, that is masterful. I say again, ocd you always make me feel good, I'm proud of everything I've seen about your project. I hope other projects did just a little bit of what you do, valuing the community and also your team.
I feel like your curators would be understanding of this decrease in rewards for a bit, until things settle down. After all, the first reason to choose to help find work for curation is because they want to help undervalued content creators, surely? Getting reward for it is icing on the cake. I drop posts at c-squared because I want to see them better rewarded. That's entirely voluntary. I drop them into the curangel queue for the same reason and I get little rewards for that, but that's not why I do it. Heck, the other curators beat me to most of them anyway! 😆
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They are crabs in a bucket. This is their final death throws manifesting. Some of them are also upvoting anti-bidbot people to try and create a dilemma for them. It hurts in the meantime, but keep powering through it, they will be on the wrong side of history. They continue to expose themselves for what they actually are, exploiters.
Ah yes the upvote bribes.
Those of us who have been downvoting are also getting downvotes. I'm getting them also.
I guess there is a cost in trying to protect the value of Steem.
As bad as I feel that this is happening to those who are doing what they think is best for the value of Steem, I think it is a phase we have to go through.
Really sorry though
In the world of blockchain social media, bit bots are the biggest turn off that keep many away from steem, I’ve heard it too many times.
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Well put. That is what inspired me to start working on Native Ads.
We're going through changes and a few negative reactions like these are expected. The silver lining is that since intentions and incentives are more aligned now, the community will find its way to healthy ground.