RE: The end of an era - the last truly profitable vote-buying service dries up.
Ocdb was unreleased for a long time due to it being non-profit and development on it being a bit slow, this is not to blame the people maintaining it as we were not in a rush to get it released ourselves the same way as we were not in a rush to restart the normal curation of @ocd as we wanted to align it with the account creation fix with HF20.
You're right that it has dried up a bit recently but that is to be expected, our delegators are not in a rush to receive max profit (at least not the original ones) same way as they decided to delegate to ocdb instead of other bid bots when it was unreleased knowing that during the testing phases the bot was giving out way too high ROI at the cost of the delegators. This can easily be fixed by increasing the percentage of votes people can buy.
Our primary concern has been with bid bot services serving mostly the owners and that's why we created ocdb to work alongside our curation initiatives. We like to think ocdb is a lot more than just a bid bot but it is understandable that at this time it might not seem that way. We are going to try our best to make this a author friendly bid bot and not leave too many people out of it that we feel deserve to use it to grow on this platform. Entitlement is something strong in the community so there will always be people crying foul but much like everything around here all is voluntary.
If anything we hope ocdb will raise the bar of bid bots and we hope to see similar competition arise.
This isn't to blame OCDB for anything. And in terms of your projects I was delighted to hear that main-line OCD is coming back. We've missed you.
I certainly don't mean to blame the people maintaining it, especially since the long beta period kept you as a relic of really useful vote-sellers well beyond the entire rest of the market. It's unfortunate that has changed now, but you have to be responsive to market realities just like anybody else. The idea of a user-restricted service that gives more value to positive community members is a strong one, but Minnowbooster and Qustodian have shown it doesn't really work for the delegators. Maybe you can market it better than they have, and make it work. I hope so. But I think the market is working against you.
Well we're not going to be that strict on the restrictions and unlike one of the others you mentioned @ocdb will forever remain non-profit. We can't make delegators delegate to ocdb if they get more profit from a for-profit bid bot, that's why we had to go down on the ROI but with additional curation on good posts that happened to use @ocdb we want to strive for increased quality and making it worth everyone's time and money.