Alright, so. First things first, I've been against bid bots since the beginning but obviously they are a part of Steem now due to the curve and cannot be stopped - we can only improve from here on out. My main concern was the big lazy investors that would delegate to anyone sending them a memo asking for delegation with the promise of good returns while they didn't care two bits what they would vote on or how much they were abusing it for themselves. This is something you don't bring up in your post at all, nor do you bring up the profits bid bot owners make. You say that its great ROI for SP holders yet many of them are powering down...
Another thing you seem to miss in your post is that currently buying votes is profitable yes, but to whose expense? Care to mention that part?
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.
Paid content promotion services create real utility and value for the STEEM token
Right, just like the "promoted" tab did?
The problems that exist are not caused by paid content promotion services, nor would they be solved if paid content promotion services did not exist
This is partly true, investors would go around vote-trading again instead and/or self-voting. Some are still doing this though and bid bots have in a way resulted in them being even more aggressive at vote-trading or self-voting to make sure they get a 100% return instead of rewarding the bid bot owners with a percentage. Not to mention the returns from bid bots are so high that most investors have completely stopped curating because they keep comparing their earnings with others and feel like they are losing out big time. This is of course also due to the unpegged price of SBD.
There is clearly a large demand for these services both by content publishers and Steem Power holders
I still feel that the huge demand is there because of the competition and many content creators may not be aware of the downside of it. Being able to both bump your post up into hot/trending while at the same time not losing any value? Wow, almost seems too good to be true, eh? Why doesn't everyone buy votes? Oh wait, yeah cause if everyone did it wouldn't be profitable for everyone - hence those not buying votes are earning less and less rewards constantly due to the finite reward pool.
I feel like people who talk positively about bid bots often ignore the obvious things that are making it profitable for them.
Back to this part
currently buying votes is profitable yes, but to whose expense? Care to mention that part?
Let's say an even 50% of authors are buying votes while the other half isn't. These authors might gain some followers, they might get more views on their posts but most importantly they are getting a guaranteed return on their "promotions" and they will keep using the profit to promote their posts again and again until they hit the vote buy cap. Who are the users that are losing out in this scenario when only a certain amount of Steem and SBD is being printed out daily?
What would happen if everyone were to start buying votes and it was in a way built in onto condenser?
These are general questions I don't really have an answer for, maybe you can help me out with it.
Its early in the morning here so I apologize if I can off aggressive and I might be a bit all over the place but would be nice to continue the discussion. I have a few ideas in mind and planning right now that could possibly improve on this but I don't think current bid bot owners are going to like it very much.
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.
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.....
Excellent points, but one thing to note is that the vote buyers that are getting into trending end up losing money from the bidding, sometimes quite a bit, but they fully acknowledge the initial losses, and do it for the exposure. It does work for them, but to me it's clear that if native promotion worked better bid bots would have no reason to exist. (Okay fine there is the profit making angle but that angle was always a silly game that is more obviously detrimental to the system)
Oh, I was under impression MB guaranteed profits.
Oh, they do (MB / smartsteem does).
But it's not usually enough to send it to trending now. And it's very rare to get their higher value votes because everyone wants them. So what people are doing now is to send multiple bids to multiple bid bots, which take over most of the bid pool and make everyone in the same pool lose money (which is actually kind of hilarious when I think about it right now, because this is an example where the motives of people using bid bots are in direct opposition, promotion vs profit)
The promotion side also, if the trending is shit there is not much promoting to do, because no company will want to look at it.
This is true, unfortunately in the current situation trending still gets a lot of attention, and is still working for those people that are doing it (so I hear). But yeah, I feel like the kind of attention you get may not be the right kind anyway, because a global trending nobody's really sure what they're looking at. But there is still a chance you catch the eye of someone that matters, and that's probably what they cling onto.
And I will ask... is it just me, or has trending actually been getting better? (As much as we like to hate on it)
I think you are dreaming xd
"Another thing you seem to miss in your post is that currently buying votes is profitable yes, but to whose expense? Care to mention that part?"
This certainly doesn't apply for the STEEM value that the "investors" are getting back from their "investment". Or ALL the holders of Steem who don't use bid bots.
Thanks, you did a much better job summarizing my own disquiet over bid bots than I managed, even if it whatever o'clock!
I think hypothetical thought experiments which take things to their logical conclusion are very valuable.
I'm currently working on a theory that steemit (and bid bots are part of this) amplify the worst aspects of capitalism, and thus encourage self-seeking behaviour.... many of the people who resist have written posts showing that it's appealing and joking about their own irrationality!
Anyway, I thought that was a lucid comment, even if you are tired!
You could add to that rip off bots like boomerang that take $4 and upvote you by $2 meaning they stole your money, jerrybanfield bot does the same also.
i know its too late to reply this but this post was so helpful in making me understand about the paid advertising.
I agree it acts as any conventional advertising where companies advertise to get viewership.I see nothing wrong with it