So long and thanks for all the fish | a reflexion to the BOT owners and delegators
I hate bidbots, because i love steem
Back when there was only @booster and two or three others, it was a fair game, some people where delegating to it to get passive income, and there was a lot of SP allocated to either manual curation or delegated to startup curation projects trying to reward original content creators.
Then @yabapmatt released for free in GIT Hub the code for the bidbots and they sprout like fungus in the ecosystem.
This acted as a SP vacuum, suddenly everyone was leasing SP to the BIdBOTS which made the price of leased delegations surge, and of course over time many free delegations where retired as a bidbot offers up to 21% ROI to delegators and vote sellers.
This killed many curation projects, not everyone can invest, so these once thriving curation projects started drying then died, and people working actively promoting steem adoption and user retention, by rewarding original content creators stopped trying. Jobs in the blockChain were lost
...They could not compete with the bidbots.
Initially the concept of bidbots was post promotion.
If you put in trending your post, well some whale might see it, like it and vote for a better reward... But the vicious circle of ROI actually drove all that organic curation to power up the bidbots and then the promotion concept was not valid anymore.
We used to think tank of a solution
I tried modifying @yabapmatt code to warranty a return for the authors, but this didn't take because no one delegated to the bot, if we share part of the rewards pool with the content creator, well... It is less money in our pockets, so people kept delegating to the promotion bots blindly and ignored the compounding problem.
Then the guys of @OCD came with a great idea (The distribution bot)
When I was invited to give a hand with the distribution bot project I felt it was the only way to go as many others thought.
I used to think the distribution bot was a smart way to get a return and make my posts look fancy and trending, a great alternative to the bidbots that do not even give a return you pay for a vote and you get less.
@OCDB as a distribution bot gives a positive ROI and if my post was trending I would for sure get a few nice upvotes, I used to think that I didn't get more than 1$ reward on my posts because i used to write in spanish.
So I started using it after discovering i was in the whitelist.
I was hoping that if i sent the max amount to my posts I would get that much desired visibility and also make a little benefit.
So lets crunch the numbers let's use one of my posts for that.
This one is 6 days old, i guess it has been around enough time for whoever was to see it in the trending have done so and voted if he wanted.
So according to the payout breakdown:
I sent 86 STEEM to @ocdb and received a vote 53% vote =- 45$ (Nice thanks!)
Here is the image:
The total payout is 45.407 $ so 99% of the payout comes from our beloved bot and 40 cents from other voters, some are friends who have setup a fanvote for me, others are organic curators (BIG THANKS TO YOU) .
Nice results ! wont you say ?..
I sent 86 STEEM and got 90 back, 4 STEEM Return on my vote that is nice !
Invest 86, get 6 back in 7 days, that is a a wooping 4.44% return on investment!
Now lets take a look deeper...
Where the 90 steem i got in the form of a vote come from ? Yes you guessed right, the Rewards Pool... What is the rewards pool for? According to the white paper is inflation to reward original content creators.
As an incentive so stake holders actual perform curation the earn up to 25% of the vote value as curation reward, that is how the platform was meant to work.
So I am paying 86 STEEM for a 90 Steem net vote, the BOT selling me (distributing the vote) is getting 31 SP (Steem) as reward for voting my content.
The content creator does the proof of brain, and pays to obtain a ROI of 4.44%, while the curator gets a ROI of 24.25%
But not only that... they also get the 86 steem I paid.
I think something is wrong with my calculations ?
The bot is getting 86 from me + 31 from the reward's pool = 117 STEEM
I am getting 90 from the reward pool - 86 i paid to have the privilege = 4 STEEM
Uhmm no, i am messing the numbers, it can't be!
Well after giving it much thought i think maybe it is because i am not a good enough blogger, but nonetheless I would like to invite the @OCDB team which i know personally and I know they are fair, to reconsider the way the distribution is being distributed by the bot.
I think that a better deal can be offered to those making the proof of brain, the content creators... a more balanced distribution so the few authors that still believe in sharing content are better rewarded ?
My content might not be quality content, but it is original, of that i am sure.
(I made it myself)
Some will try to explain to me that this is due to the high price of steem that is skewing the reward distribution and reducing payment...
Well I am a small stake holder and the same as the rest of you, dream for steem to go to the moon so my investment crows in value.
If steem price is what is reducing the rewards... That can't be right, we all want steem to be high.
I think that a distribution bot should incentive its customer base by a bigger share of the cake, afterall, the reward pool is meant to reward the content creators, no content creators, no content, no content no justification for STEEM...
Oh wait we can always play DrugWars and SteemMonsters, but then...
It is not the fault of @OCDB
They do not keep a share of the earnings, they trully distribute all the earnings + the curation rewards and their curation rewards are massive most of the time 24% as they tend to be the bigger voter.
The problem is greed of the delegators, the only reason people is delegating to them is because they get more money from @OCDB bot than from a normal bidbot (or at least the same amount of money).
But once again no one is thinking of the author... In order to be able to compete in ROI for the stake holders most of the money drained from the reward pool ends up in the hands of the delegators and the rewards on the content created by the author even thou they are high, since they come at a high cost by buying the vote they are not proportionally equitable.
If they were to give the votes cheaper, it would mean the delegators would need to sacrifice revenue... And then they will just simply leave to the next bidbot...
Lets see what gives up first, the content creators or the bidBOT business
Think about it... If the content creators leave... well erm...
We are not a content creation platform anymore...
I don't know please can someone help me with the calculations? I know i am wrong.
The only way to solve the problem...
Would be to stop using the bots altogether, once the stake-holders stop receiving payments because there are no customers buying the votes, maybe then they will realize there should be a proper distribution of the rewards pool.
Then maybe the price of leased delegations will come back to a level were a win/win situation can be achieved.
Then maybe content creators will adopt the platform as their effort is being recognized.
Smart bot owners will adapt their profit and smart stake holders will adapt the allocation of their stake to organic and paid curation.
Smart entrepeneurs will restart the organic curation projects and the ecosystem might come back to a healthy balance.
Less abuse from the post farmers as humans will be deciding the rewards.
You may say i'm a dreamer...
But I'm not the only one.
Hi all. Nicely thought article! We are @profitvote bidbot owners. Currently we have one of the biggest ROI on Steembottracker, 30% fixed minimum and maximum return (the only bot to offer 30% minimum guaranteed return). We pay out 100% of our earnings to delegators. Our only profit comes from curation rewards that are around 12-15% max. We have 28K delegated SP. We do struggle to attract big stake delegators inspite of having the better business model (both towards authors and delegators) compared to other bots. Our profits do not even cover server expences, but we are still there hoping for the better times for the whole community and eventual steem price increase.
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It's weird that you only got a 4.44% ROI, we've updated the way the bot calculates according to @yabapmatt's update. It's supposed to be a fixed 10% return so not sure what else than the price fluctuations are what caused this.
Anyway, I'm with you about what has happened to curation and my thought with @ocdb was that instead of giving a ton of free Steem to bid bot owners that got lucky early by receiving a big delegation after forking a bid bot and doing nothing after that but earning free rewards, we could instead just reward decent authors and give delegators a competetive ROI to what bid bot owners were offering. This way holders and authors get the most out of it.
We have some ideas for the future to divide the whitelist and increase ROI of some users depending on their performance but there's so much to do right now we aren't able to focus on that part. One way we can effectively add more ROI to authors without taking it from delegators is by throwing some votes with @ocd or our own personal accounts. Once things start getting more competetive we might start doing that, we were hoping more people would start creating non-profit bid bots or distribution bots but so far we haven't seen much.
Having said that and reflecting on some issues and countless dm's lately we want to make it clear that being on the @ocdb whitelist is a privilege more than a service. Although many users have understood that and acted accordingly, there are many that use it for whatever and then start complaining when we warn them. This isn't walmart where customer is king, this is an addition to us having curated you in the past and giving you a chance to grow your stake and rewards from your posts since curation is close to being dead. If you can't get it through your head to not abuse @ocdb then your chance will be quickly gone without you being able to call customer service and complaining about it.
We will be posting more clear guidelines soon and hopefully get normal curation and growing the whitelist going again.
I have actually been doing this and curating a little through the list to try and add more value to the whitelisted users as I have a lot less time to curate at the moment. It has been interesting to read the mix of content that goes through there when i can though.
Yeah, I also imagine there are some accounts, even though small in stake, that will over time start stacking votes on bidders just cause of the curation rewards. I know many do that with bid bot votes even though they may face the risk of getting flagged so I'm sure the ROI will increase over time in different ways as well. If anything it will always be profitable at least even though the exact ROI keeps fluctuating.
This is a tool that people can use to see curation returns.
https://beempy.com/curation/@nnnarvaez/trading-or-finding-my-trading-style-ii-having-fun
Funny one is the first vote got a massive 500% return :D
That's insane lol, how...
early tiny voters can get massive benefits even with the penalty. Generally on my posts they are getting 200% at that time but it only works for tiny votes. Some of those curators are making decent percentage returns on their stake.
I think the really tiny ones just get wiped as dust
Don't think so. It is only if the entire post doesn't make it over .02 cents. Curation is paid as long as it is over 0.001 and the entire post made it past the 0.019 I think
I do too, that is how i end from time to time commenting in one of your posts, I like the lean back writing style.
Hmm, powering down plus only 0.5% of voting power used? Very inefficient to keep 99.5% voting power, isn't it?
Someone recommended @ocdb as an interesting alternative to bidbots. I'm not whitelisted / out of the circle, just curious.
P.S. Do you distribute bids among delegators or only curation rewards?
They distribute everything to delegators bot bids and curation, that is why you probably noted is in power down.
As per VP always close to hundred it is the way the bot was coded so it can give max payment for every vote.
It does not work as the other bots the spends 2% per round it queues the votes and only votes at a 100 %
Yet is true that today there have been an unusual number votes probably customers noticed that with the increase in price the vote was not being profitable and are waiting for the price to settle to use it.
Which is a problem to delegators because days with no sells are days with no revenue
Then seems quite fair at first glance. Big problem of wealth concentration remains. Account is controlled (~ 95% worth of delegations) by only 7 accounts, thus at the end over 90% of newly created steem / SP goes into those few accounts spiralling wealth concentration.
Inequality is inevitable as physics laws dictate, yes, interesting, I think I got a topic for my next article! Too little inequality is bad (communism) too much is bad (dictatorship), the point is to find this sweet spot.
@ocdb is too focused on profits for big players, I think. Doesn't move wealth equilibrium to optimal position, but enhances current dictatorship like wealth concentration.
Not an easy problem to solve, to be honest.
No man OCDB is focused on taking delegations from the BAD big players.
It is about the only bot that shares a little with the author and it is the only one that KEEPS 0 for the trouble.
Most bots you pay 10 and you get 5 OCDB you pay 10 you get 11 (sometimes more sometimes less but always more than what you put)
It is a different problem.
It seems they are not that BAD delegating, as nobody can force them? It doesn't change the fact that 90% plus newly created STEEM goes to only a handful of accounts, further centralising funds.
Better than 90% going to delegators and 10-25% going to the owners of the bots is what he is saying.
The Curation percentage is not generally 24% on the bot I would say but it depends on what it is voting on. I checked the last one on mine and it wast 17%-ish. Ocdb generally votes very late because it usually has a queue which means the large vote stacks up and distributes to other curators too, not just the author. If the vote came in early it would effectively lockout all other voters from curation returns - like the bidbots often do.
Just so you know, one thing you haven't included is the people who are in the delegator list and how they use their stake. While some are maximizing their return, others are far from doing that and many of them are actively doing a lot of other things on the platform with their stake. Some of them have a lot of stake delegated out to other people too.
I am a content producer myself and I have worked very hard for the stake I have and taken many, many risks. I had the same conclusion you have now, back when the very first one started in summer 2017. I fought pretty hard for a long time and made some enemies along the way, but it is what it is until a few more things happen on the platform that can change it.
For me, ocdb is a middle ground that can at least help some decent content producers grow steadily without having to compete with other bidders. It returns the same for all. While not ideal, it is better than the alternatives. On top of that, it has attracted a lot of stake that would have otherwise gone to other bots that don't care much what is voted on at all and, don't mind that users make losses.
I have made more enemies on steem than Napoleon in his time hahaha.
I didnt mean to attack delegators or ocdb, but lets be honest, the only reason there is 4million SP on OCDB is because the big big ones are getting at least the same than delegating to other bots, and there is little to none important SP curating organically.
I don't mean from my payouts point of view. I mean from a community point of view.
Have you realized the waiting time from an ocdb Vote went from 1500 minutes to almost immediate?
That means less people is using the service... Either they are gone to other bot, ran out of steem or are not posting anymore...
Which one it is ... I don't know, what I know is that I used to keep a 250+ good content creators community in Spanish with less than 50kSP and most left because the Effort to reward ratio was not satisfactory once i lost the 45K delegation i had.
Also I have been for the last 2 months trying to lease a delegation and not even at 22% APR my order gets filled... Nodaways you can only lease small ammounts from dolphins and pre-dolphins.
(BTW If you would like to spare a delegation, check @reveur, I am trying to rebuild a tiny community of hodlers there and every little helps)
Not quite true other than for the largest delegator and account on the site.
This is true of all on the platform because, all of the SP is the same. It is silly to think that 30 odd whales are meant to sort and curate 40,000+ posts a day. Expecting them to do it on top for no return isn't going to happen is it?
There has to be more reason to stay at Steem than the rewards but, many never actually try to work out what that is for them. Instead, they look at it as a weekly revenue stream rather than a long term investment while having some fun along the way.
I say the big big ones are getting...
Follow vote organic curation projects with less SP that you get a big chunk of the Curation rewards.
Well blame jerry marketing plan... The population we have came here because someone was posting on facebook: Hey i posted a picture of a cat and got 400$
The +250 authors I was educating and pimping and teaching were actually community building and learning and being ambassadors for the blockchain adoption with proper and responsible use of the resource.
They moved on to new grounds where the promise of community, rewards and engagement was better fulfilled and i cannot blame them.
There are 3 reasons I stay here:
It isn't enough while there are the bidbots around. That is the issue and I know, I did it for a very long time as did others.
I do blame Jerry and others like him. However, everyone makes their own decisions on how they run their lives and their accounts.
They move for rewards, I have seen the engagement on other sites, take away the rewards, they die.
I don't know what a parasite chain is :D
Take the rewards away and i go back to my personal blog / web radio rockdio.org
Can you blame people writing 3000 words quality posts receiving 0.001 payout from 150 voters.
Authors that would be happy to get 2$ per week from their content as it is about their waves in their countries?
Authors that grew their account instead of using it for food?
The masses that will make steem scare so the price increases will not come from Europe or the US, they will come from third world countries.
That doesn't means they are bad, that means they will be happy to get a little revenue from a decent paying post 3, 4 $ (50/50) post and increase their stake little by little.
They can even decide to make this their full time job and promote and educate others.
It is a chain that doesn't have a mainnet, my chain uses steem custom json objet to store its encrypted ledger.
it is like a primitive implementation of SMT without the central delegation of trust.
4 dollars is 10 Steem.
There is a pool with about 800k Steem in it now. That is 10 steem 80,000 accounts. Then there is the interest, the witness. That is 30% combined gone. Then there is the difference between countries and what is offered. And that 800k isn't daily. There is 26 million spread out for the year.... You get the idea.
Then there is the problem that most of those small accounts are selling now. Who do you think buys from them? This technology isn't ready as an income stream yet, this is a building and development phase.
People are selling Steem at prices that they will likely regret later. Sure, some 'need' it but the thing is, if Steem never existed they would have access at all, then what? Relying on Steem for income is a poor position that many take. Necessity is one thing but there is a cost to every position taken.
They are selling it at price they will regret and you and me are buying it.
But the argument of the minnows dumping steem is fake and oversold.
In Venezuela community for example the steem never hits the exchanges there is a few services that buy the rewards from the dumpsters and keep them in the platform.
Thier volume rarely exceeds 200 steem per month
Minnow just don't earn enough to have an impact on the price when they sell...
Remember the tail in the candle that took steem price to 1100 satoshis for a few seconds 1 month ago...
I was actively trading that day and there was no volume at all in the market just the odd minnows selling their 0.010 steem... So when a bot tried to sell 10000 steem it ate the whole order book.
Steem price is controlled by the huge accounts playing in the exchanges.
Remember the weekly korean pumps on the SBD of 2017 ? from 0.8 to 3$ and back down in 15 minutes...
Dont blame the minnows and the dumping.
Just 2 weeks ago when i was still in trading i was bored and with 1 BTC i managed to make a little ladder that moved the price 200 satoshis in the direction i wanted...
I kept doing it for about 2 hours until i saw whale activity and as a good small fish retired my walls and went to hide in my cave.
Its a balancing act with ocdb. The more rewards you give to authors the less the delegators get. If you cut the rewards delegators get well then they will just delegate to other, higher paying bots.
Bidbots are a solution to a problem of the current system and that is post visibillity. You fix that and you put a cramp on the bid bot market. Also, as other projects come to the platform that pay for delegations that will also take away from the bid bots.
In the end Steemit is just one use case for the Steem blockchain and hopefully one day there will be hundreds of dapps that will be created in which we can use to earn steem.
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Well a great post. Just like you I am a small shrimp in the Steem Ocean!
I rarely use upvote bots. But I have done it, but probably never made a profit on it. So the great thing about @ocdb is that is does guarantee a profit. To bad that I am not whitelisted. Open up the whitelist @acidyo :)
It is hard to grow! It is hard to find people who do upvote your posts based on quality content, shared interests and so on. But I will keep on trying!
Cheers,
Peter
I like your post. I'm new and have no idea whats going on. I don't go on this site as much as I would, because I run out of credit and then can't follow or like anything. I feel a bit dumb not knowing all the ins and outs, but from my point of view, I just wanted to try something different from fb and insta. All the other stuff gets overwhelming for me personally as a noob. I don't know if other noobs feel the same as me, just kinda stunned like a deer in headlights. :)
There is like 10 different levels of users in this platform, just enjoy what you are doing make friends engage here and there you will discover a group of people who thinks alike you and have a lot of fun and little by little you will understand a lot of things.
Not all that shines is gold is the first lesson, but this place is fun...
This is a complicated discussion about programming, platform economics, business models in the platform and politics...
It is normal for you to feel overwhelmed but dont worry over time it all makes sense, just now you are in a room full of Sheldon Coopers discussing quantum mechanics.
In the we seem to be fighting but we are all in agreement :)
Just my opinion
If you hate Facebook then build the next Facebook and make the old one irrelevant
When we’ve millions of active users and killer DApps these bitbots will become irrelevant
More Building Less Talk is my approach with our Blockchain
I've already built a lot for our blockchain, even if today i have little to show, before my heart attacks (3 of them) I was running 3 witness nodes including mine, a curation project, a blockchain university, an antispam police service, a radio show, a community delegation bot, coding bots for discord communities, a banking service a steem lottery, a hosting service for steempress...
I was generating around 10 fulltime jobs with steem and some 40 indirect ones, promoting it outside and inside, organizing fund raisers to do social work.
Check my blog 6 months ago, check bebeth, dcabellor, reveur, banca, castellano.
I bought all the SP those accounts powered down a rule of mine was no more than 5% of VP is to be allocated to the project accounts.
I've done my part
I did that while others were busy posting... Now is my time to post
Thanks a million for all of your contribution to our Blockchain!
I did it because i kept meeting people like you!
Ya que utiliza el servicio de hospedaje de WordPress de @reveur y el plugin de @steempress-io para publicar contenido en nuestro idioma, el #castellano, si deseas saber mas o formar parte, haz click en la imagen para entrar a nuestro discord.
You are thinking about this all wrong, friend.
That's not going to happen.
That's not a solution.
That is a fantasy.
I'm truly not trying to be offensive or insulting. You want Steem to be the best that it can be, and that's great!
We have to ask ourselves why people want to buy votes. Why are users willing to allow their hard-earned SBD to get raked by an upvote bot?
The answer is an incredibly flawed trending tab that assumes the highest paid posts are the ones people should be looking at. Therefore, users are spending money to upvote-bots and essentially paying rent to get visibility on the trending tab.
If we want to stop people from buying votes, we "simply" need to make better trending tabs that curates content more intelligently than what Steemit has to offer.
If we want to eliminate upvote bots that are raking a fee off the top, we need to make a decentralized market where anyone can sell their vote to anyone else using a service that takes no such rake.
In effect, we have to wait for developers to come to their senses and stop trying to make products that leech the reward pool by monetizing their product.
If it's not open source and decentralized, the product has very little value to the Steem ecosystem.
We need to find more ways to reward selfless programmers who are working for "free" while at the same time punishing developers looking to exploit the platform for short-term gains.
When it really comes down to it, so called "content" here is free, with an option for tipping.
If we want whales to buy what we are selling, payment must be forced.
That's why projects like @steemmonsters and @drugwars have done so well.
Blogging is simply the sad pilot episode of the Steem blockchain.
I am sooo sad to agree... That is why i close my post with a quote from Lennon's imagine...
The trending issue comes from the bullshit we where fed to justify vote selling in the first place... Get noticed so you can get bigger upvotes...
To me the root of the problem was the availability of free easy to install code to make a bot... git install postpromoter
That was the root, because when there was only MB and Booster selling votes there was SP hunting stuff to curate, just that is also a huge effort and the reward was not enough, hence the reason all went to bidbots.
If instead of delegations accounts follow voted curators they would not be renouncing to the rewards and that would be profitable with 0 effort, but the times when selling a vote was a mortal sin are long gone.
This place is today the result of what we made it... I don't know why saying that i think of the terminator movies...
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