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RE: STEEM DOLLAR Peg Debate : Stakeholder Analysis
There are lots of people who Author and Curate, yes. But there are some who put a lot of time and effort into one or the other. At the start of this year I ditched my Curation effort, delegated my SP to a vote bot and focused my energy on Authoring. Much better for me? Perhaps yes. Is the platform better off if this is a broader trend?
IDK where to start with tackling the problem of vote sell bots because making curating more rewarding/fun by drastically increasing the rewards for popular posts could start a slow migration back to organic voting and curation trails yet that wouldn't necessarily stop people from gaining exposure through the bots and the bots in turn building their STEEM and SBD up while reaping even more rewards should a post turn out to be popular.
Maybe instead of trying to fight the bots we could join them so to speak.. so that there is a development to make investors "sponsor" authors or make vote buying part of the system. The healthy way and intended feature was the promoted tab and then one would think that that the simple solution would be to make the weight/benefit of the promoted feature outweigh spending money on votes from bots.
I take it that your bot is a vote selling bot and clearly you made the right choice, how can you argue with reaping the benefits of both curation rewards and instant moola, it's a no brainer that wasn't forseen by the community for months.
If I remember correctly the first voting bot was the famous berny randowhale and that was around march? so when it did happen it was something that many should have seen coming (Intentional manipulation for profit) but did not and since then I haven't heard any solutions to this, besides the one bot (forgot the name) which came out a few months after randowhale capitulated on the oversight, which would vote and use the money you'd send the bot to promote the article which clearly is the best alternative as the closed loop of profit (exponential much algorithm) is broken and we don't run the risk of creating a bubble by inflating the value of the coin and token as the value sent to the bot is burned/locked in the null account.
Clearly all of that happened long before the korean blow up of SBD so it doesn't have much to do with it but it certainly didn't help the situation and has been compounding (...) since.
My logic is that if you increase the Curation incentive then there is more Curation and Authors don't need to rely on Vote Bots so much to get exposure.
I guess there will always be vote bots and they are including some standards recently like post age limits (to ensure bots are used for promotion rather than profit incentive) and some bots owners are also doing blacklists and applying some post quality filters. So in a way this is a form of curation but I do think it goes against the spirit of the systems intended decentralised design.
It's not hard to see that it also plays right into the hands of the vote bid bots by making their curation rewards outweigh the immediate and direct profits of selling votes, it might make them even more powerful and entrenched. The fact is that there is a feature designed to promote posts in a healthy way but that feature needs to be polished some more, and then again it might not work, as then the promoted section will be over-run and the bots might still be that extra advantage over the other promoted content that people would run to in order to be bumped up above the rest so we are at "there will always be vote bots".
This exemplifies what I remarked to the idiot virtue signaling charity a few comments above, about "good ideas", which hardly are good or considered and aren't really good ideas but in reality are piss poor excuses for ideas, least good.
I don't think it's against the spirit of decentralization, and I think one trap people constantly fall into with this issues is blaming the faceless mass of investors for the way things are and I say challenge that nonsense even when its merely insinuated because it fosters the polarizing us vs them mentality and that division cannot possibly be healthy for growing a community.
HF17 I think is the correct number - being able to lease your stake. This allowed the vote bots to grow, but it had also allowed the likes of utopian and dtube to attract a lot of new users, thus pushing up the rankings, I presume.
@baah: "IDK where to start with tackling the problem of vote sell bots"
How about you just stop using them and encourage your followers not to use them either, and they encourage their followers....
@buggedout, why not find a real person on here that votes the way you would and delegate to them?
If there is no market for the vote bots, there won't be any vote bots. It's just that simple. Just like throwing drug dealers in jail doesn't solve the problem of drug sales. As long as there are users out there, someone will be selling.
Ultimately that is where everything lies on, the everyday users shoulders, but the problem can be approached from a technical standpoint and not an interpersonal one, a place which stands at the base/ in the background, the algorithm that makes it not profitable/rewarding to use your voting power on bid bots.
And still, why lose profits when you invested money and time here? Why should anyone stop using vote bid bots outside the altruistic motivation since the market exists because there is a demand and that demand won't go away, clearly. You could do away with drug dealers tomorrow without stopping anyone from using drugs, and that's by making selling drugs not profitable, who would sell drugs when everyone can grow and manufacture them for themselves and their friends?