RE: Crush the Bid: Rethinking bidding bots
Bid bots are the perfect vehicle to bring in money. Not only, as you pointed out, does the vote seller take no risk but they capitalize on our inherit greed.
If we as a community would all agree to just vote the minimum bid each time we voted we would maximize our profits/$ spent since the higher the value of vote the lower the % return. Then the only variable would be the number of people voting in a round.
But since we always want to one up the other one or take as much for ourselves that we want we make the large crushing vote to take for ourselves. So I really like the idea of bid capping.
I also agree that the owners of the bid bots should be held accountable to the accounts that they let use their services. More of them should be actively banning accounts that are upvoting spam.
Or maybe create a master list that if you are banned by 3-5 upvote bots then you can't use any of them.
I think crushing the bid would be reduced if more users actually understood what they are doing. So far I have been tight-lipped about my bidding strategies because I don't want to give away the secret sauce, but I've come to realize that if more people followed my strategies, they would be more successful, not less.
So watch for a tutorial on how to reduce risk and increase profits from bidding bots to be published this weekend, probably.
Delegating to bid bots is a great way to generate cash flows on an underlying SP position without having to actually cash out. It's a great move for whales, as long as they don't think that bidding bots are harmful to the ecosystem. If bidding bots are harmful, then it's terribly short-sighted and they'd be better off just cashing out.
There are no easy solutions for how owners should decide what accounts use them. Point 4 is a step in this direction, because it creates visibility for investors (delegators). If you scan the list of what was voted on and it's all garbage, you remove your delegation and give it to a different bot. Similar returns, but better content. This would be a positive move.
That's a band-aid solution. Since there is no centralized authority, there would always be upvote bots that compete by not having any quality controls. As long as they can find investors, the demand for the product will always be there. And that's the real underlying issue: demand is limitless and unsophisticated. That's why i think the answer is for the 'industry leaders' to adopt ethical standards. That's why I called out @yabapmatt to take responsibility for keeping the services listed on his site to a certain ethical standard. Like it or not, he is the single most influential person in the bidding bot industry right now, and he needs to take ownership of the responsibility that entails.
I don't think it's just greed. I think there's an element of gamification to it too. However, it's much easier to win the game when the price of Steem keeps increasing -- as @theinsideout mentioned above. I just wish more people who use the bots would take the time to understand them. Since that's not likely to happen, I agree we should have some rules in place to protect the community.