RE: Steemit: What Would You Do If Your Influence Keeps Diminishing Inspite Of Powering Up?
Interesting post and topic firepower, here are my 50 cents on bidbots.
Bidbots are a cancer that will destroy steemit if they are allowed to proliferate as they have been over the last year or so. I haven't used a bidbot in nearly 6 months and I will never use one again.
Here is my reasoning why bidbots are a massively negative mechanism:
Bidbots rarely return a profit for the people bidding for a vote and in most instances return negative ROI. This means they only serve 2 purposes in regards to content creators.
To allow less than quality content to be boosted up into the trending pages:
They prey on the hopes & dreams of decent content creators to make something of themselves on steemit. Drawing new steemians into cycles of making very little profit on their posts by spending money to maintain the illusion of success. This is the worst kind of mechanism for a creative platform like steemit, as any writers of a certain level will be put off immediately and look for other places where they can legitimately make decent money from their content.
There are only two sets of people who benefit from bidbots:
Greedy people who would rather delegate there SP to a bidbot owner for a return of the profits than curate new and exciting content.
The bidbot owners. I have seen various bot owners pleading poverty, saying they are running at a loss etc. Hmmnnn, I don't believe this whatsoever.
So, if we have a look at these points it becomes abundantly clear that bidbots are raping the reward pool in the most cynical way. By preying on the hopes and dreams of people, while facilitating some whales in not spreading their VP around steemit to help the platform grow and sustain growth of everyone.
In conclusion, I am a curie curator, and I have seen many authors of a very high quality, many of whom have been published outside of steemit, leave this platform over the last 6 months. It is these mechanisms of corruption which is causing this bleed of talent. The people who can make a difference at the top need to decide what they want steemit to be, devs could stop these corrupt mechanisms if they chose to and I personally think it is a balance between content and entrepreneurship. Sure there needs to be businesses/initiatives running on steemit to sustain it's economy, but this doesn't mean we should just blindly accept businesses which rape the reward pool and give nothing back at the expense of the content creators. If there was no quality content here, there wouldn't be a platform.
P.s. I continually power up my earnings from curie curation and posts so I am invested in this platform but i don't have any further funds to boost my own SP up to the point I would like. I strongly believe in the future of steemit and it is intrinsically built in to my future plans for life. I will never give up :-)
Well.. we are on the same track. I have pledged not to use the bidbots either. Even at instances I got $0.0 for the posts which I would have written by taking many hours but I never used bidbots. I'm still continuing here because of the mere hopes!
When small users ask me if bid bot use is good I suggest them to do whatever they feel is right. Earlier manual curation was fun because the curation rewards were also higher.
Communities like #steemstem and #utopian-io are completely against bidbots. Using bidbots produces a negative impact and many good steemians won't even look at our profiles. Indeed I have no reasons to lament. Personally I have benefitted a lot after entering into steemit. I'm measuring it not with the eyes of mere financial growth, but as a person I got acquainted with many good people all over the world and also gradually developing my writing skills.
Afterall we were producing contents on various platforms such as Facebook and Quora for free of cost. If we get atleast 1 cent for our post, literally it is a gain! I won't use bidbots at any cost since I don't want to be even a small part of the so called reward pool abuse. I'm developing my skills a lot. That is enough for me! It will pave me ways to earn something beyond steemit.
I would say people like jerrybanfield and haejin are a curse to steem blockchain although the system is decentralised. I think a 50-50 curation system also can serve many purposes!
Good on you @sathyasankar. Although it is hard at the beggining I firmly believe that you will be better off joining the various discord communities to get engagement on your posts, rather than spending your own money to boost them up to trending. If everyone took the same choice of not using bidbots like you have then things could improve a lot for the small fish and the big fish would still be earning big rewards but would simply have to write a post to get them instead.
IKR! This is just hilarious! I've seen and heard enough on these lines. Feels scammy AF!
I was a curie curator from its earliest of days and for quite a while actually. It was just great fun looking for content and curating it. Those days we did some great things to empower people and build up the community. I was so disappointed when I saw curie loose it's delegation. Now I just look back and say, those were the days! sigh.
I've had to junk several of my own projects owing to lack of engagement from the community. I had a strong feeling months ago that we'd be here sooner than latter and it didn't take long to get to stage where bot use is profitable over real content creation. Liberosist and I've had plenty of discussions about this months before it happened.
But with large stakeholders finding the lure of easy money via bid bots the best way to profit on their investment there's nothing we can do. This process of profiting via delegation allows them to quickly increase their stake as well.
It's too bad there's no separate pool for downvoting. If there was, that's something I'd use a lot around here! I'm sure many users would as well.
I wonder if someone can pull the data on how much of the reward pool is distributed purely by use of bid bots and how much of the pool goes to the delegators.
Hi firepower yeah, it is a sorry state of affairs and I'm not really knowledgeable enough about the blockchain tech at the heart of steem to be sure of my reasoning on how this problem could be resolved. In my mind it seems the only way to stop bidbots would be if everyone just stopped using them at once. No profits = no bidbots lol.
But human nature dictates this would never happen. For example, I have hesitated ever making a post about these feelings and thoughts before for fear of a concerted flagging from the people behind these bidbots as I'm trying my upmost the last 10 months to build my rep and position on this platform to a point where I can achieve my dreams of writing and travelling off the back of my earnings. This ties in to what I say about human psychology, people are scared to speak up if they are serious about trying to build their steemit presence, greed + fear are strong motivators/deterrents. I don't know if it could be tackled at a base level, like by steemit INC? I have read a little about hivemind and it seems that it might be possible to freeze bidbots out by the community mechanism, like if hivemind was used in conjunction with SMT's to build dedicated community reward pools (maybe based on types of content, e.g. writing or visual arts etc) and made it more profitable then vetted people of talent to be part of the sub communities pretty soon all that would be left on the main pages outside of these communities would be the mediocre and poor content. However, even as I write this I realize that this idea (even if I'm close to what will be capable with hivemind + SMT's) would be open to corruption as well.
Wish I had been around then man! It sounds like it was allot more rewarding and maybe esaier lol. I'm not moaning at all but curie curating is hard now. I was in among the top 4 in November/December/January but even then it took a lot of work. Now, it is V difficult finding more than 3-4 decent posts/week to submit based on the stringent criteria and my time constraints. I think I joined steemit a year too late.
I think you've hit on one of the problems for community minded people to take concerted action against the negative people and businesses here on steemit. To fight against them you pretty much have to give up your chance at earning much as long as the battle is on.
This is really sad and I know where you're coming from. I recently helped to launch a steemit charity as part the sndbox summer camp final quest challenge and the charities intro post received minimal support. The bulk of it's organic support was from sndbox and I had to go on a big publicity drive promoting it in various discord channels to even get it noticed. I would have done that anyway, but the steemit ecosystem as it is means that the whale/dolphin support just wasn't there as few of them will be looking at the #introduceyourself tag. Why should they bother.
Anyway, rather than end this comment on a downer. I'd be interested to hear your opinion on what I was saying about hivemind/SMT's. As I said. I'm really not that technically minded so I'm not sure I've understood what they could be used for in a community sense and would value your insights :-)
I haven't used a bidbot in quite a while either. Didn't feel right to artificially inflate my importance in the marketplace. Last time I did use them however they were profitable. Seems that things have changed.
I was also surprised earlier today to get an upvote and comment from @botreporter, @bycoleman and @transparencybot due to the fact that I didn't use a bidbot on my post. I guess one way to help fight bidbot activity would be to delegate some SP to @transparencybot or one of their other accounts and maybe upvote their comments. Looks like the pro-bidbot people have beat up on that account quite a bit. It's got a negative seven reputation score. Seems like they could use some help.
Hi @randr10 I also recently popped up on @botreporter, @bycoleman post about trending articles that haven't got there by using bidbots and in that case my short story had been found by another curie curator and that is the only reason I was there. This is the sad fact that it's the only way I will get there as well, despite having had my fiction + poetry published in magazines etc. I am seriously considering not posting short stories to steemit until after I have submitted them elsewhere and had a response from the publication, as I lose first publishing rights when I post to steemit. The truth of the matter is that less dolphins/whales around means less chance of any type of meaningful reward based on quality unless @ocd or @curie find you (both amazing curation communities who I can't praise enough). This is mainly the fault of bidbots as, I can only assume, whales/dolphins delegate away the bulk of there SP when they're not actively producing content and a lot of them are circle jerking there way to a tidy profit even when they are producing content. I'm not going to mention any names as I would be risking a flagging just for pointing out the truth but I have studied a few of these types of circle-jerkers and often they produce less than quality content while people spending hours producing good interesting stuff are left out in the cold simply cause thay don't have the SP to offer anything to these greedy minded people. Ha ha, anyway I've gone on a rant again ;-)
I'm new here, and from what I've read from most users is that bidbots are problematic. However, if they are problematic, how come they are allowed on the site in the first place? Just asking because I honestly do not know. I'm still looking into this/doing my due dilligence research on bots and earning on Steemit.