RE: On Voting Bots
A lot of bid bot owners are blacklisting people and sharing those lists with each other which is a good first step - surely rewarding yourself with a post every other day for doing this work does not seem cool, you're already profiting a lot by running the bid bot.
This is pretty disgusting imo. There should be a whitelist, not a blacklist. Not much scope for a $100 post saying 'hey, we added 10 people to the whitelist today!' though. Although it may receive the same level of engagement, F A.
No-one cares about a blacklist update. They are using abusing the 'promotion' business, and this business earns enough to make this a task they do, as part of house-keeping and providing the best service.
What would happen if everyone were to start buying [or selling] votes..
The best answer I've seen from a bot owner on this so far? 'Well that won't happen'. I'd like to hear a better response from Matt on this.
Profits are there to be had by everyone in the chain: delegator - bot owner - user (sometimes). The reward pool, and thus the blogs of the non-users suffer though. And what's 'promoted'? Some pretty average stuff to say the least - so the votes aren't even going to a good home.
And so with our outward facing page, we have Bloomberg calling our content 'low quality'. Imagine them looking in if @curie or @ocd boosted posts were at the top (like in the old days) - a different story for sure.
@acidyo, how would you feel to see your name at the top of 50 shit-posts a day? Ashamed? I would.
The price would go up. Eventually it would balance to a point where the total profit in the system was equivalent to the friction of powering down.
So we should fix our outward-facing page so that it features the top content of the best curators, rather than whatever post was voted the highest. Getting rid of bots won't make Trending significantly less stupid because Trending is a fundamentally stupid concept. Look at its equivalent everywhere else in the world. Instead, let's make a frontpage that's user- and community-driven.
If I compare @crokkon's analysis today with the price charts I'm seeing a 3 month low in price at peak bid-bot usage. Unless you are willing to support your claim with data, sorry, I disagree.
See my post today for a novel way to order Trending/Interesting, equally gameable as it is at present. Got any ideas? We could try and model the results.
I don't understand what this has to do with what I said? When I say "the price would go up" I mean the price of votes, not of Steem. (Also you're going to see peaks in bot usage at Steem price dips because of the way the feed price works. When people know the feed price is going to fall, smart ones stop buying bot votes.)
My idea - which I am totally not willing to do the work for so I'm just bullshitting here - is that there should be a Curie-style curation community for which every active post is eligible, and their output should be the front page.
I don't think anything automatic will ever be satisfactory.
Sorry, that wasn't clear. And you can buy votes with SBD or STEEM.
The rounds are pretty full, and have been for 5/6 months now.
As per the comment on my post, a lot of @curie voted posts used to hit trending - some call it 'the good old days' :)
A white list is a very good idea....
I couldn't quite articulate it in a short space of time, it'll take a week or two for it to gestate, so I thought I'd leave it for now, but I'm sure there's something ideological in all of this 'there's nothing we can do about it' and 'it'll never happen' line of arguing.....