RE: Do you blow your load in 1 minute?
Optimizing one's vote within a one minute window will involve much more randomness than within a 15 minute window. Why? Because there are things like network delay that could easily be in the seconds or occasionally even tens of seconds. However, it's clear that all the bot votes will come before the first minute is up. This will definitely favour autovoting. I wonder if I should really come around to writing a voting bot of my own. It could be an interesting challenge.
I've been saying for quite some time now that some Steem-Engine token or future SMT could try not taking the voting order and reverse auction into account at all. Only the voting power used would matter. What people do is read what they read (their own feed) anyway. Guaranteeing everyone the same ROI from their SP regardless of any other factors might free them to reward what they enjoy without any interference from bots. That could work better than what we have now.
Yep.
I think so but, what are they autovoting on? put flags on top of the usual suspects and things change again.
It could but in general, the small accounts grow at a faster rate than the large as the large can't frontrun really. While people scoff at the small amounts, when there are so many small accounts, it adds up over time.
They could autovote established and popular authors who do not use bid bots.
Front running is but a small factor in the growth of small accounts, although it would become more significant with the 50/50 split. I think @ocdb is by far the best on Steem so far to help smaller accounts along. It has turned many Redfish into Minnows and Minnows into Dolphins. Note that @ocdb a centralized curation project in the sense that getting whitelisted is a decision made by a handful of people as well as getting delisted. Musing was another island of centralization that worked tremendously well at spreading stake.
My vision of successful Steem is a collection of communities where community standards are enforced by the members whose social standing depends on being a good community member or apps with a lot of centralized stake that are capable of effectively maximizing quality for the benefit of the company running the app as well as rewarding quality accurately.