Who will create the content for the Bid-bots to 'promote' in the future?
In the future, the Steem Blockchain interface that you are looking at right now will likely have options available to filter out Bid-bot promoted posts.
Browser extensions will likely have this feature in place even sooner, and right now you can install one called SteemPlus that will make an accurate guess as to weather a commentator on a post is a 'bot/spammer/human'.
Communities may well also choose to hide Bot boosted posts from their feeds in order to keep a solid set of Trending/Hot posts which match their vision and goals at the head of affairs - Anyone wishing to to make a name for themselves in a community will have to 'go clean' to do so.
source
So what's next for Bid-bots if when this takes place?
Who will bid on a post that is hidden from the most popular interfaces and feeds?
The Bid-bot Dark web
So we have our communities and their custom feeds in place, the content valued the most by each community membership will sit proudly at the top of each feed, receive more views, more votes, and these authors will quickly gain a good reputation in this field.
Will the bid-bots no longer be of use and slowly die out?
Sadly, I don't think so.
If the number of bids reduce due to authors seeking involvement in a community filtering out Bots, another user seeking ROI, and only ROI will just take their place.
Will they give a shit who sees their content? Nope
Will the delegators to said Bid-bots care if the content is viewed or not? Probably not
Will the Bid-bot owners care if the content meets their 'standard' but is not receiving many views? I doubt it.
Will the deadly efficient raping of the reward pool still exist? :(
I've got an idea
What about just creating an alt. account and producing 'short-form' content or memes and sending bids there?
Too late - It is already happening
Some prominent community figures are already ahead of you.
Seemingly not happy with the witness rewards, Bot SBD sends, the curation rewards from the Bot votes, Bot posts, and personal account posts.
For maximum ROI and a coin-filled swimming pool, in addition to the above, it works to create some alt accounts, produce debatable content, and throw Bot-earned stake in that direction.
source
Am I revealing who I've spotted doing this? Not yet.
It would be good to see an adjustment in strategy this next week though.
Who will create the content for the Bid-bots to 'promote' in the future?
The businesses and people that care only for collecting and much money as they can, as quick as they can.
Asher @abh12345
More posts like this one / #bidbot
What would Steemit look like if everyone chose to delegate their stake to a bid-bot?
How to make friends and influence people
As a community we can start now by not voting for any content that is using bidbots and also removing your vote from the witnesses that are running them. I really believe that only a grass roots movement can beat this destruction of steem by greed.
Well said. Is there a list of such witnesses who run bots?
.... I already removed @jerrybanfield many moons ago, although in fairness, not so much for the fact that he started running a bot, but rather because he just generally did my head in.
Haha... I'm not alone...
Thanks, i was trying to find a list also, luckily @abh12345 made this post a while back. https://steemit.com/busy/@abh12345/how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people
Great thanks!
I agree with the grass root movement . the only problem is that it needs numbers of people . Most people are uninformed . This is a very important subject and one that I try and pass on in my small pool . It is not good enough to just make post and comments , one must also educate himself in the platform and it operations .
Yes indeed, you can see that by all the votes made to the posts on the trending page. Upvotes that would be better served going to quality content and not as payment for a hopefully reciprocated upvote.
exactly ; people are voting there because they believe it helps them . I've been putting out that the trending page should be avoided by newbies . I myself have not gone there . They should instead build their foundation make comments, create good post and get out of the now mentality .
Hear hear!
This is the message my Curation League post is trying to put out each week. Welcome on board there, the post will be out in a few hours :)
thank you very much
Agreed!
It's not even the case that a low SP user will gain the most curation by voting on the biggest payout posts.
I could not agree more with this.
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Asher you should become a witness, maybe even add a friend like @paulag to partner up with... And then you could help clean this place up...
Ohhh wait, you are already doing this! :)
How much are we paying you? 'cause it's not enough! :D
Thanks for the words of support @davemccoy!
haha... you could cut my pay in half and I would still work for you both! :)
ps... I decided to give a preview of the week ahead once my Play 4 a Newbie contest is over! ;)
That's a grand list of games you've managed to find taking place Dave!
haha.. thanks :)
Haha, @davemcoy I was just thinking that @paulag was already teamed up in a witness role that I voted for, then I saw your tag. I didn't realise that the Asher everyone was talking about was @abh12345.
Now I know, and knowing is half the battle.
edit:
Sorry, I thought I was on @profanereviews. I just went and voted with this account too.
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well... not too accurate most of the time to be honest, the training data leaves a lot to be desired...
but damn am I curious for the reveal!!
Yeah... the efficacy of that one showed itself to be of dubious merit. Or, at least, the algorithms will need a LOT more tweaking...
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Probably bots.
Reminder: you can use @heimindanger's clean trending toy to voice your disapproval of this anti-social industry.
https://steemwhales.com/clean-trending/
The smart ones don't boost their posts that high. No need to bring attention to others when you have your own little empire on the go.
Exactly!
Uncool behaviour!
bots of the bot owners bots?
Eventually competition for bids will be so low that probably yes, bidbot owners will compete with their own bot customers to try to make back the money they lost from lack of userbase.
They already are :)
Who will survive depends on what price (if any) they are paying for the delegated SP.
And we wil have driven good investors out of the platform and call in the scammy ones mining and extracting steem
That is how my country lost it all... to the Chinese and the Russians
Yes, bots created by the bots that the original bot owners created, Everyone feared Skynet when they should have been fearing Steem bots all along.
Who will be the John Connor of our time.....?
Wow - that's a great tool, thanks for the link. Especially like the 'downvote the trash' link!
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Bots 4 Bots
Well, I’m sure some people will or already are creating bots to post to the bots for the bots to upvote? It’s a bot world and some of these people just don’t want to interact with humans. I’m not sure what kind of sad world some of them live in but I don’t want any part of that!
The biggest issue will be for how long will these people still be getting the ROI on both ends? What I find interesting is some of these people are delegating just about all there SP to a bid bot than spending what they earn from that and their rewards to buy more bids. What kind of hyperinflation world do these people want to live in?
I would just love to see more control in how trending and hot are presented.
Should they be doing more for communities around them?
When I look at bid bot system and how easy it is for anyone to exploit it I just wonder why they don’t try and protect themselves more. If all their investors suddenly decide it’s no longer worth the steem they make every week for the amount of damage they are doing and take back there delegation they start to become rather powerless.
One thing I’m a bit shocked by and perhaps I’ve just never noticed. Why are they not giving out free votes to high-quality undervalued content/creators? If that is the “purpose” of these things like some people claim. Should they not be the ones every week going out and showcasing 10 posts a week or more for free? Surely their investors can’t get upset about that as its showcasing the true power and lead by example of what is considered a quality post at different price points.
If we think about it from an “advertisement” standpoint. Then they should all place themselves behind a paywall and kick bad actors. It’s one thing for these people to have their vote pulled or be downvote on a couple of open posts they have. It's another thing if they are out 20-100 SBD they had to pay for membership on top of buying votes.
When people don’t feel invested in something they have no reason to respect it. There a reason why if a site runs annoying bad ads people block them. Even more so when some of these ads on sites have malice intent. They get removed as soon as discovered. It just looks bad on the advertisement providers if they don’t create an end-user experience that people are willing to put up with. Which is why people started to create ad-blocker extensions in the first place.
Many have earned enough to a decent-sized bot with their own SP.
A very cool idea! But why do that when you can upvote your alt. accounts?
Worth exploring as an idea but > Time/management/costs = reduced ROI.
Thanks for the comments, I hope others add more ideas here :)
One of the trends I’ve been noticing over past few months is I’m getting smaller votes from the same people. It’s not that they are giving me a lower percent. It’s that they have delegated a large holding of their SP. In their wallet you see them being paid out every so often for doing so. Which makes me wonder. How self-made are these bidbots when compared all other delegations they get?
As far as lower ROI. They have lower ROI every time they have to pull votes or the community as a whole downvoters what they have upvote. Not to mention if someone with massive SP decided to just target one bidbot over another due to “ethical reasons” people will start to go elsewhere. ROI will drop as a result for the owner/investors for not being a good Steemit citizen.
Meanwhile if someone was playing the field onto a more “I’m an ethical” bidbot service they could charge the premium of a membership fee if they could prove posts are less likely to be down voted when compared to their competitors. Not to mention if people who were delegating to them where getting a bigger return than well they just have more of a reason to keep doing business with them.
Granted I’m not sure why I’m saying this here. I don’t want them to make even more over the long run. I would just prefer since we are stuck with this situation that overall the platform gets a better experience than we currently are.
I Just find it odd if I go and post something right now with just the letter A I could give one of these places 40 SBD right now and they have no issues just using there voting power to up vote that. You would think that would be reserved for their top customers who they have not had many issues with in the past and are not going cost them losing out on that curation rewards along with getting called out by the community for upvoting that post by so much.
In the long run the more users who get sick and tired of it the more someone going do something about it. At some point there got be that breaking point where certain types of posts only show up in promoted section since they are in fact being promoted by buying the votes in the first place.
I've seen the same happen and read others reporting this.
I think this is on the cards down the road, we can hope :)
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The way we are going we are more likely to see content dry up and bots used just to farm Steem!
It's the worse case scenario but can't be ruled out completely!
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curious, how about the scenarios where bot filtering can't be identified as the bot business farm out upvotes using accounts of legit voters and having access via steemconnect with active key request:
Example: smartsteem and minnowbooster
these are also the 2 more successful profit making business on Steem right now, they can upvote a post $500 to $800 using Steemians with 200 SP or 2 Million SP, they can make it looks like you got 1000+ legitimate upvotes, and looking at the blockchain you can't tell any different.
With the Steem blockchain wallet owners willing to give away their active key openly and liberally to business websites like this, won't all the other 100+ (and increasing) bot-owners just all evolved to do the same thing as this 2 big "Steem-Coorporation?"
Even worst....why are we not rewarding legitimate flagging? Perhaps mechanism to take away the rewards of big bot farming (pile on and trending view) and self-upvoting (not getting flags) must be part of the solution moving forward.
I can run a query and check everyone's wallet to see if they are being paid for their 'daily delegation' to these services.
Similiar to what I was doing in this post: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@abh12345/how-much-available-sp-is-there-for-steemit-com-content
Everything is tracked, so it's just a case of having the will/need to get stuff done.
Thanks for raising this :)
See https://steemit.com/@steemflagrewards and https://steemit.com/@flagawhale. It's happening :)
I understand you can track who gets paid by smartsteem and minnowbooster, but we can't correlate an upvote done legitimately and an upvote that was done by the bidding company when a user Steem Power went up past a certain %-percentage, the bidding companies they transfer the funds payment internally, and they user move the SBD lump sum into the their account later, could be weeks, or months later.
i've thought about this:
find a solution, let me know, I look forward to seeing your feedback.
i have visited both of them before, but I didn't know you were driving and supporting them, will go upvote https://steemit.com/@steemflagrewards and https://steemit.com/@flagawhale both sounds like very healthy initiatives. i like the names and the spirit of the initiatives!
you got my witness vote:
I was thinking just to rule out anyone currently delegating to / receiving payment from one of the services mentioned. It's a bit hardcore and perhaps the communities can come up with something better before we reach that point.
I'm not in the driving seat with those initiatives, but I do like what they are trying to do - https://steemit.com/abuse/@anthonyadavisii/dailytop10open-s-spam-downvote-campaign-final-results-new-mmorpg-ranks
Thank you very much for the witness vote!
can't remove everyone from that service, will make it too exclusive a trending list, i notice from interaction with others that 30-40% using those service not to gain bidding income but to not waste their Voting Power when it hits near 100%, so they set it at max 99% to upvote, or say at 96-98% for the smaller steem accounts as there is no 100% guarantee that smart steem or minnow booster will use the smaller one when it reaches near 100%.
also another problem, i've seen 1 guy who does not even take minnow booster earning at all, but 100% cycles the earning to self upvotes to raise his Rep, we can't even filter out those cases, he's unique, not many doing that, very specific goal he's trying to achieve.
It's trackable.
Read minnowbooster/smartmarket wallet for transfers of money with a website link.
Cross reference timing of upvotes on person's account by people who allow those services access to post on their behalf.
these services usual return funds not spent on upvotes. so you have a window of voting, on a specific article and have a list of people known to sell their vote.
Until they change the method... this will work.
only if they transfer the SBD from the Steemian wallet to the minnow booster / smart steem wallet, if they use the internal SBD accumulated, there is no wallet memo..... not that I can see any
even if there is a link to the memo from the SBD, how would you correlate lets say my upvote done at the same time, it could be genuine, how would you know it's part of the bid upvote, there is no true timing correlation, they could use 2 accounts to give $10 or they could use 200 accounts to give $10, how would you differentiate on a popular post with 1000 different accounts upvoting
this is how the yel'pap does it he uses the shill minnow upvotes and let the view rackup from trending viewers who won't upvote to justify making it look instantly popular when it's really majority paid upvotes
i did appreciate your feedback about using that timing and memo, it's tricky to catch all these creative ways of bidding
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I remember this user who at the time that I joined Steemit was someone that I aspired to become like because his posts were earning 50 dollars and more and he was already in the reputation 60. So wow this person was someone trusted by the community. Or so I thought.
My rude awakening was when he started posting 5 times a day with just Marvel characters and I commented on a favorite character of mine and he replied with absolutely no fucking idea what he was talking about.
I revisited his posts and saw the pattern of 1 paragraph to start the post, which talks of the origin of the character, 1 image, usually the hero, and one ending paragraph that states the powers. He even placed a sourced link of where he "allegedly" got the info so that if Cheetah comes knowing he can say he properly cited.
Yet I know where he got his info and he changed a couple of words so it wouldn't be seen as outright plagiarism.
That was it I discovered he was a golden shit poster that tried to outsmart the system by following upme's protocol on what is considered a shit post.
Imagine that 5 posts that were 50 dollars and more a day. 250 a day for something that he took off a wiki on Superheroes.
I tried frontrunning his bots for awhile and collected a sizable curation reward but posting 5 shit posts a day used up my SP and decided to stop and just forget about him and focus on upvoting posts that I care about even if i get less curation rewards.
If we let the current trend that bid bots go rampant then we will look into a future that it is all crap.
The funny thing is these shitposters don't care for engagement and their post is like a bot graveyard of the confirmations from the bots that it has been upvoted but no human read about it.
Haha so true. Some of those posts you get to bottom and into the comment section and I'm like "nope I'm getting out of here." Nothing but bots leaving comments. That has to be so depressing.
I know that user, I was also following him until he started to make a paragraph posts on Marvel character and boosted it to 80-100 USD.
Yup. Much to agree on here.
I've front-ran a few obvious bots/big votes for a little while, it's about as rewarding as sitting in your own pee and i've since stopped trying to earn anything extra from doing that.
Onwards we go!
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I think the problem is we have forgotten that BOTs are meant to remove repetitive tasks from humans so humans con be free to create an thrive.
What i mean is that BOTs at least on STEEM platform have been poorly used for self profit and not to help us use the platform for what it was meant to.
Greed is what drives bot owners...
I'm an automation engineer and i have an army of bots running behind me and my proyects but them all are used in a responsible way to promote the principles of the platform.
Many people is unable to see that BOTs properly used are there to help us, and instead of fight all BOTs we need to fight the bad bots...
But well, that's very difficult to achieve because no one agrees what the platform is about... And while we try to educate and show all the possibilites to have the many understand what is wrong with some of what the few do...
The greedy bad boys are smiling and taking it all...
Yes, I think there are good uses for automation and I'm not against all the bots - @transparencybot @grammarbot @duplibot @badcontent, @cheetah, etc, etc.
The worst offenders are the non-contactable bid-bots, that have no black/whitelist, and seem to never remove any votes that are clearly placed on absolute crap.
When they know it's crap, but wont remove a bid because they'll lose 2/3 SP for the curation..... money over content/platform.
I was making a non profit BID-bot designed for the Spanish language reality (500 K SP curating 4000 active users)
But i dropped the project as it will not call the greedy ones and the rebelious ones would not support any bid bot.
The way i see it:
As long as there is no ethic and responsible counterpart to something the sheep will keep using blindly what there is...
As a extreme simili example :
Western societies have been Secular for a few hundred years, in France being a Catholic is a sin against the State, that is what has allowed islam (especially bad part of it) to pierce and attrack the ones looking for alternatives because they are nor secular... So their message is join our religion, join the social revolutions... (I dare say this here... in france i would go to jail for saying this in a bar)
PS: I am an agnostic and have nothing agaisnt responsible religious people of any creed
I just like to match block-chain problems to society problems (Maybe we can work out solutions to both)
I like your thinking and efforts to do this as it sounds like the promised land we are seeking.
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Quite frankly @abh12345 when that option to "filter them out" is implemented it will be like a bloody breath of fresh air! There are FAR too many authentic and passionate authors on this platform that honestly never even see the damn light of day - and whilst it may not rid the platform of them completely, I do think it will make a huge difference... for the better!
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Totally, and a real shame.
Let's just hope that when these authors are finally surfaced (via removal of the rubbish) there is a reward pool left to compensate their offerings.
Absolutely!